Frances Fitzgerald (Fine Gael)

The Minister of State indicated there was a concern that the scheme was no longer targeting genuine need among older people. Will he elaborate on this? I take his point that the backlog of applications has been cleared. However, what is the case for those who apply between now and September? Are there contingency plans to deal with them?

I welcome Minister of State's assurance that the scheme will be re-launched in September. Can he assure people who already have monitored alarms that monitoring will continue, even under the revised scheme?