Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Much of what has been said on this side of the House represents my views, although I would perhaps take a more radical view. I am intrigued about the way we put certain aspects of our society into boxes. While I may use the term "society", I should say "the present regime" because after ten years of the present Government, one must accept, regrettably, that perhaps it has an insight into the thinking of Irish society currently, which those on this side of the House will have to change.

With regard to the Bill, there is no point in anybody telling me that this is what was there before. This is not the Ireland that was there before. It is a classic case. At the end of the 1980s this was a country that had in preceding years come close to going the route of some of the countries of Latin America. It is always worth remembering that Argentina was a rich country by European standards 60 years ago but ended up in a Third World condition.

That is what this country had to deal with in the 1980s. A considerable amount of stress was involved, as well as debate and discussion about an agreed solution — I still believe many changes decided then were extraordinarily unfair. Nevertheless, that was the situation. It happened in the context of extraordinarily limited resources, added to the fact, about which nobody seems to talk any longer, that Germany's Bundesbank was continuously looking over our shoulder to try to keep us out of the European monetary system. Therefore, our finances had to be not only on the right side of the Maastricht conditions but vigorously and substantially so. Otherwise, we would have provided a very convenient way for the Bundesbank to assert itself. The Germans had to get a little humble later when their finances when out of control, but that was the view at the time. They wanted to use us as the proxy to get at Italy.

I say all this because this was the context in which the Government of the time was constrained with regard to public expenditure. Some of that period was led by a Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats Government and some by a Government in which Fianna Fáil and the Labour Party were involved — there was a variety of Governments. However, the fundamental values that arose at that time were wrong, and they are wrong today.

Section 7, which goes to the core of this issue, outlines the level of evaluation of an old person that must take place before he or she gets any subvention. The Bill does not specify that the person carrying out the evaluation must have a qualification but must be any person "who, in the opinion of the Executive, is suitably qualified to make that assessment". The Bill does not state the person should be a nurse, doctor or physiotherapist or otherwise, and we have no guarantee that it will not be bureaucrats who do this work. The capacity of the Health Service Executive bureaucracy to believe it can make decisions that professionals should make is remarkable, as any doctor or nurse in the service will know.

The Bill contains a long list of qualifications necessary for a person to be even classified as being at a level of dependency. There is also a long list of conditions with regard to income assessment. Why pick on the elderly in this way? This is what I mean by compartmentalisation. Imagine we did this with regard to primary education. Imagine we went through this level of evaluation of people's incomes before their children could attend free primary education. What is the difference? Why is it good to provide universal, free primary education? With all its limitations, it is undisputed that we have an extraordinarily good primary school system, with good teachers.