Fidelma Healy Eames (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for being here. I have some questions on the forum. My concern is that forums seem great in principle, but in practice they are often not worth a whit and have few teeth. I was a member of the HSE forum for a while at which phenomenal issues were discussed and great questions were asked, but I am quite sure that not one bit of that was fed up the line. I never saw any legislative changes emerge because of the health forum. What teeth will the proposed forum have to ensure that feedback is taken on board? What assurance can the Minister give us that feedback will be taken on board and how will we know that?

My second question concerns the application process for membership of the forum. Senator Leyden may have been a bit inflammatory, but some of his comments were made with good reason. The Minister will recall John Walshe's recent book on being an insider in Deputy Ruairí Quinn's Department of Education and Skills. It showed, to my great shame, that Fine Gael's only concern was to get two to one for every membership on the education and training boards. That is what they spent their time being concerned about, and Mark Kelly broke down his door to achieve it. So it does matter that random homeowners are chosen.

Who will oversee that process and who will ensure that there will be people on the forum who can mediate for the concerns of family members with specific medical needs? On Friday, I put on the record the details of a family that wrote to me. They have with an autistic son with eczema who needs four baths a day, which uses a lot of water. One bath occasionally is a lot of water, but four baths a day is a huge amount of water. I was shocked to learn that the medical exemptions in the Water Bill had been removed. Can the Minister verify that? It is a serious issue if the allowances for people with medical exemptions have been removed. It is a concern for people on dialysis, for example.