Attorney General: State's legal strategy towards nursing home fees 'sound, accurate and appropriate'

This afternoon a Government spokesperson said that the report finds that the Government had acted "prudently" in settling claims over private nursing homes

The State's legal strategy towards those charged nursing home fees was "sound, accurate and appropriate", the Attorney General has found.

A report from the Attorney General's office into the historic handling of claims by those charged for private nursing home care was requested by the Government last week.

The 30-page report published this afternoon finds that "the legal advice furnished in respect of the litigation concerning charges levied for private nursing home care was sound, accurate and appropriate".

Attorney General Rossa Fanning finds there "is and was a bona fide legal defence to these cases".

The Attorney General points out that "the public interest is the only interest that the State can have regard to", and that this must include "consideration of the interests of taxpayers and those dependent on public services today, as well as claims relating to the past".

The Attorney General states that "it is clear the Department of Health acted prudently in settling claims involving care in private nursing homes rather than risking an adverse outcome in a test case, which could have provoked many more historic cases, with a very substantial potential exposure for the taxpayer".

The report also considers the Disabled Persons Maintenance Allowance and the historical question of the legal authority of the Minister to withhold payment of the allowance to persons in full-time residential care funded or part-funded by the State and litigation relating to non-payment of the allowance.

He confirms that there was "no positive legal duty" to make retrospective payments.

The Attorney General concludes that "there was good reason for the State to be concerned about its prospects of successfully defending one case that was brought, at least as insofar as the period between 1983 and 1996 was concerned".

There are no changes to the State's legal strategy on foot of the report and the Departments of Health and Social Protection are expected to report back on the issue in three months.

Last month, it was reported that successive governments before 2011 and up to the present day devised and have applied a strategy to deny refunds to people who were “illegally charged” nursing home fees.

The State faced the prospect of €12bn in compensation for hundreds of thousands of families wrongly charged for the care of their loved ones over a 30-year period.

The central allegation held that, worse still, the Government even knowing it could not win in court, sought to contest the cases and only settled when people proceeded with their legal actions.