David Norris (Independent)

I strongly support Senator Fitzgerald. This is the core of the issue. The fact that this is not rights based was referred to briefly earlier. This is the get-out cause but it was not put in by the Minister or her Department. We all know that. We know from where it came. This is the Department of Finance at it again, and it is extraordinary.

The Minister has correctly invoked humanity. No doubt there are people in the House who would invoke Christianity, the Christian response to the elderly and that society is judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable. We make an assessment of the needs and then say we might or might not cater for them, and the governing criterion will be financial. We assess the need and then say we will reserve the right to ignore it. That is astonishing. It calls into mind the parable from the Gospel: "I was sick, and you took care of me. I was in prison, and you visited me", and then nothing was done. He knew he was sick and in pain in hospital but said, "That is just too bad". We know about that but we will do nothing about it. That might be understandable in the financial circumstances we are in, but it is a great pity.

On this section, I ask the Minister to look again at the question of the capacity to give consent because I am not certain of it. I am not a lawyer and I believe the Minister, with all her intellectual distinction and charm, is not a member of the legal profession either. Her advisers may well be but perhaps the body language suggests they are not. It might be no harm to refer that section of the debate to the lawyers to determine if there is something in the question of consent.

Whatever else we might get some movement on, I do not believe we will get movement on subsection (11), the get-out clause, because we have had so many battles. Senator Fitzgerald is correct. This is the disability Bill all over again. We fought tough battles in a previous Seanad led, I acknowledge, by my colleague, Senator Joe O'Toole, to try to force it on to a rights based condition, but we failed. If we failed then, when there was, to mix a metaphor, air in the tyres of the Celtic tiger, it is very likely now that the Celtic tiger has sprung a leak, to use another mixed metaphor.