Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)

This is a rare instance where we have an example of something that could be best practice, that maybe could be an example for other countries and other places which are dealing with the litany of residential and non-residential institutional abuse. We have something which Ireland wrote: here is an enhanced card. We have gone to the trouble of looking into the details and figuring out how we can really support you, and not just in terms of a standard medical card because we recognise that yours is not a standard situation, that you have had particular experiences. What I am hearing from the Minister is, we are going with what we did before in terms of the mother and baby homes and the Magdalen laundries. In each of those there have been calls for something like the enhanced medical card. It is something that people said is good. It shows the State is listening, that it is looking at the lives of the people affected and asking what will really help them, not just what is an already existing bar in our charts so that we can add them in to the standardised medical card, and that we have created something that will actually acknowledge that people have had usual and bad experiences at the hands of the State. It is a pity.The Minister is leaning back to us doing the standard practice rather than the good practice. That is an opportunity missed, not just in terms of this scheme but also in terms of trying to set the bar for better practice moving forward in all of the other ways we have talked about. I think it is really regrettable, so I will press the amendment.