Victor Boyhan (Independent)

I hear what the Minister is saying but let us be honest. There are caps on the funding and the money is not realistic. There are caps on the health assistance. The Minister made the point about the HAA and the special needs. Mental health is a health issue and it is very hard to quantify that. There are people who want mental health supports and cannot afford them. It is expensive, there are long lists and there is the educational stuff. These are all caps. I hear what the Minister is saying but, as she has identified, the big thing is those who are excluded. I have raised Westbank three times with the Minister.

I could be a happy man leaving here today, knowing of the Minister's calibre and commitment in government, and the high esteem she is held in. She is in a very critical position and is sitting around the Cabinet table every week. She is one of the key decision-makers. I was asking for the Minister to commit. It is about being a stakeholder. Is the Minister committed? Will she give this House an undertaking that she will go away and make a strong case for a pension for the farmed-out people? The Minister represents a rural constituency and I am sure she has heard stories about what happened there. There is a case to be made for a pension for them and also for medical card assistance. They have a critical need for support. We are not talking about a huge cohort of people. One of the big problems is quantifying those numbers and no one has really been able to quantify the numbers out there. I would like to think that, rather than read from a sheet of paper, the Minister could say that she, Helen McEntee, was committed to touching base with her colleagues in Cabinet to pursue an ambition and objective to recognise that there was a need for a pension support and a special health package for the people that were included in this, and, moreover, that we knew there will be even more people in the future.

I will finish on this point because I do not want to prolong the debate unnecessarily. The Minister made the point that, in a few weeks or months, we will also have the schools. I know we will have a lot more coming down the track. For any of those people, for example, those who were in the Spiritans, with whom I have been in touch in the past few days, if they are looking in and seeing this, given it has been going on for 27 or 30 years, they will be saying they had better get some sort of package going locally because they could not endure all of this and could not endure this length of time. It has gone on unreasonably and many people are elderly.

I met a man some weeks ago who did not successfully get through his process in terms of identifying his documentation but he was very nearly there. I met him in Ballinasloe with some colleagues. His daughter rang me three or four weeks ago to say that he had died. I want to put on record my thanks to Councillor Evelyn Parsons, who very much supported him and his family in trying to get to the real story. Sadly, he died. He had a very sad story to tell. Everywhere he went, he met closed doors.

As I said before, it is not necessarily always about legislation. It is about doing the right thing and providing the humanitarian, human response.