Tony Mulcahy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Senator Moran asked last night if I wanted to say something and I was vacillating whether I would do so. I do not know whether I will hold this together but I will try my best. On 17 March 1992, St. Patrick?s Day, our lives changed forever. My now 20 year old was born. As Senator Cummins has outlined, she is a chronic epileptic and does not really speak. She has a vocabulary of approximately 24 or 25 words. Anyone who wants to tell me or my good wife about caring can go ahead and try. The first day I walked in the back gate here I got a telephone call one hour later to go home because she was in an accident and emergency department following a bad seizure. I will not be lectured on my conscience. I wanted to get that much out of the way.

There are cures and remedies. Before anyone goes home today I ask them to do one thing for me, namely, go to the library and read page two of The Irish Times. That is all they need to do today. There is an article about service providers and carers referring to all the wonderful work of the Sisters of Mercy and Daughters of Charity and the Brothers of Charity. The ¤300 in question would buy my young lady a half a day of care at the Brothers of Charity in Clare. It costs ¤2,800 to open the house there at the weekend. Apart from the epilepsy, my young lady is manageable. She is okay with her friends and they manage in the house. However, we should not be spending ¤2,800 to open the house at the weekend and I said as much to the Minister recently when we were discussing it. The money should follow the client. This is the greatest decisions we could ever make and it is job No. 1. We should buy the service where we want to buy it.

I hope the Cathaoirleach will give me some latitude. The model of service delivery in this country is wrong. Up to now we have fired money at a raft of agencies. They have wonderful and different names. Four of them contacted me in recent weeks about the cut in the carer's allowance and I e-mailed all of them in reply. I asked for a set of their annual accounts, what they were paying the chief executive and what the top ten salaries were. Lo and behold I got no reply and no more contact from them either. However, the details are in the newspaper today. We understand a lady in St. Michael?s House - I will leave her name out of it but she is the chief executive - is earning in excess of ¤200,000. Some ¤75 million is going to that organisation. The Brothers of Charity received ¤187 million and the chief executive earns ¤150,000. The top people in Enable Ireland and the Irish Wheelchair Association earn similar salaries. Under the model of service delivery when these bodies were set up we got money, appointed a chief executive and paid him from ¤80,000 to ¤200,000.