Questions still not answered on lost medical cards

If the room was filled with people who had lost their medical cards — the child with Down’s syndrome, the cancer patient or someone with motor neurone disease — they would not believe what they were hearing.

That was the conclusion of the chairman of the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC), John McGuinness, at the end of a five-hour meeting during which 10 men from the health service failed to answer a range of queries from politicians hoping to get to the bottom of the controversy.

Instead, they reamed off legislation enacted from 1970, they repeated a mantra that the law has not changed in the 43 years since, and they repeated their cliches that “fairness, equity, and consistency” is applied in the system.