John Paul Phelan (Fine Gael)

I do not have much to say that has not been said already. I welcome the Minister of State to the House. It is opportune to have this discussion, although outrage has been expressed in these Houses and elsewhere publicly since the announcement on budget day that the automatic entitlement to a medical card for the over 70s would be removed.

I agree with my colleague, Senator Donohoe, who has put very well the case in support of the principle of universality. I have always favoured the notion of universality. I regard myself as being slightly to the right of centre on political issues in general. There are some services that the State should and does provide, particularly in health care and education, but there are also other services. We have universal arrangements in many aspects of the services provided to the public. A universal system of education operates at primary and secondary level. Pensioners already have universal access to free travel once they reach pension age. Therefore, the principle of universality clearly exists.

In 2001, the Government decided to extend universal access to a medical card to all people over the age of 70. It was one of the most cynical political gimmicks I have seen in my time of watching politics and it has been exposed as a cynical gimmick by the nature in which the Government is removing it now. If it believed in the principle of universality at the time it extended such access — it said it did — it certainly would not be seeking to remove such entitlement at this juncture. Such access was introduced in 2001 in advance of an election to buy people's votes, which it succeeded in doing, but equally the removal of this measure will succeed in removing votes from the Government when it comes to the next election. The Government deserves the scorn of the electorate to which it has been subjected in recent weeks. I join others in paying tribute to the efforts of the pensioners who gathered on the street outside this House and in other areas, those who contacted their local representatives and made known their views. They forced the Government to change the proposal it announced initially but the Government has persisted in this regard.

Senator Donohoe made an important concluding remark. He suggested that the savings from this change will be minimal because the new income threshold that will apply, which is far too low, will automatically demand a certain level of means testing and administration, which will eat into the funding that is in place for the medical card provision.

I concur with Senator O'Reilly's comments on the discretionary medical card. The Minister gave an assurance in the other House that the discretionary card would be extended in future, yet the funding for that scheme appears to have been frozen. I do not see how those two issues can be squared.

Senator Butler stated the Opposition has not acknowledged the efforts the Government has made to support pensioners in recent years. I have done it on many occasions and the point has also been made by other speakers. There has been significant improvement in the lot of pensioners in recent years in terms of pension entitlements, and the provision of medical cards for over 70s was a significant improvement when it was introduced in 2001, but now it is being removed, unfairly, from them.

Since the introduction of the scheme it has never been properly explained how the Government made such a ham-fisted effort of it, in terms of not knowing how many people would qualify for an over 70s medical card. The Government did not appear to know how many people in the country were over 70 or at any rate it made a radical under-estimation. As a result, the Government did not know how much the scheme would cost. That was a ridiculous state of affairs.

I will emulate Senator O'Reilly who referred to his personal situation. My father died before Christmas last year. He had a medical card to which he was automatically entitled. That was the case for everyone aged over 70 until the budget measure resulted in the Bill before the House. I do not think he ever used it but it was a source of comfort to him and to us as a family to know he had it. People like him worked all their lives in this country at a time when taxes were high and many people left the country because they could not find employment. Those people who stayed helped to build the economy that became the Celtic tiger and they should be entitled to the comfort provided by a medical card, even it they never use it.

As Senator Donohoe indicated, it was not the Opposition who stoked up this problem; it was the decision of the Government to announce the removal of the automatic entitlement. That was an appalling decision and an insult to pensioners. I appeal to the Government to rethink its position on the issue, even at this stage.