John Dolan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, for coming before the House on this matter. This scheme was abandoned or abolished by a decision of the Government in February 2013. I am concerned it has taken so long to address it. I will focus on three areas. In recent weeks, there was a letter from the Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath's, private secretary following a presentation that he made to the Joint Committee on Public Petitions last October.

The point was made there that it is not possible to provide an estimate of how many persons would currently be eligible for the payment of the mobility allowance if the scheme had not closed. I find that amazing because I asked the Oireachtas Library and Research Service which contacted the HSE and I have come up with my own estimate. An estimate can be challenged but when one looks at the drop in the number of people in the scheme since it was closed and looks back at the pattern prior to that, I estimate probably up to 900 people have lost out over the past five years since the scheme was closed to new entrants. The Minister of State has been very strong about telling us that none of the people on the scheme has lost out and that they still have it but the people who would ordinarily have been coming onto the scheme, where others died or moved onto other things, have not been catered for. It is not acceptable by any means and the Department has not put enough effort into it.

At that committee meeting I asked when the Department had been first contacted by the Ombudsman. Deputy McGrath told that meeting in October that it had been in 2011 but a report undertaken by the Ombudsman includes several appendices. One, appendix 3 on page 31, is a letter from the chief investigator in the Office of the Ombudsman on 3 February 2009. There was a response to it three months later from the director of the disability and mental health division in the Department. Later that year, both the director general of the Office of the Ombudsman and, finally in November of that year, the Secretary General of Health became involved. Something is going wrong if a Minister of State at a committee does not know the basics of when the Department was communicated with in writing. On that occasion, I also asked why, in 2013, the Department did not put that scheme on a statutory footing. The response I received on 24 January 2018 was that it was not possible to place the then mobility allowance scheme on a statutory basis given the finding that the schemes were in breach of the Equal Status Act. If one reads the Equal Status Act 2000, on page 20, section 14 outlines certain measures and activities that are not prohibited. It simply states: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting (a) the taking of any action that is required by or under" and goes on to outline these, of which the first subsection is "(i) any enactment or order of a court."In 12 days time, it will be five years to the day since the Government abolished this scheme on equality grounds. A simple procedure could and should have been put in place to copper-fasten it as a statutory scheme pending the advice of the Ombudsman, which was to make sure that people over 65 were included - thankfully, people are living a lot longer now. That was not done. At the committee in October, Deputy Brendan Ryan asked the Minister whether there was any funding in this year's budget and he said there was not. We still do not have the legislation and I have no sense or hope that this legislation will actually go through this year. We will then be into the seventh year without dealing with something that was regarded as urgent while ordinary people around the country are losing out.