The massive cost implications of the State being forced to stop charging pensioners for nursing home care was known to at least seven senior civil servants at the Department of Health more than a year ago.
Documents prepared by six of the civil servants in January 2004 for the Attorney General indicate the annual bill to the State if the charges were found to be illegal by the Attorney General could be at least €381 million. The documents were passed on to the department's then secretary general, Michael Kelly, but never reached the Attorney General.
The documents also confirm the civil servants knew there were legal concerns at the time about the practice of levying charges on elderly people with medical cards in long-stay nursing home care.
The then minister for health, Micheál Martin, claims he never saw the documents. Given that the file is missing, it cannot be established if Mr Martin's office received it or not. It would have been stamped by the minister's office if it arrived there. The Travers report into why the illegal charging went on for so long said there was no documentation showing the file being logged in or out of either Mr Kelly's or Mr Martin's office.
Opposition parties claimed in the Dáil yesterday that Mr Martin had been briefed on the nursing home charges controversy. As Mr Martin denied the claims, the present Minister for Health, Mary Harney, admitted the nursing home charges affair - which could now result in the State having to refund up to €2 billion to those illegally charged - was "a total mess, quite honestly".
The documents prepared by the civil servants and released by Ms Harney yesterday said if an automatic entitlement to residential long-stay care were established by medical card holders, a significant cost would arise for over-70s in private nursing homes.
"It is conservatively estimated that the annual cost to the State would be in the region of €381 million plus the projected additional nursing-home costs for inflation," the documents said.
The documents were to have been sent to the Attorney General by Mr Kelly but weren't. Mr Kelly has claimed he passed them to Mr Martin's office because of the financial and other implications if the charges were found to be illegal.
The civil servants who prepared the documents in the file were assistant secretary Frank Ahern; principal officers Charlie Hardy, Jimmy Duggan and David Smith; and assistant principal officers Nora Lynch and Robbie Breen.
The Travers report chiefly blamed Department of Health management. However, Opposition parties made renewed calls for Mr Martin's resignation, claiming that while the practice went on for nearly 30 years, it was never clearer than during his tenure as minister for health that it was unlawful.
Mr Martin said the Travers report had cleared him of responsibility for the debacle. Ms Harney strongly backed the core conclusion of the report, that failures by officials were of much greater seriousness than failures by politicians.
Commenting on the fact that Mr Kelly had stepped down as secretary general, Ms Harney said it was not the case that anybody was being "scapegoated for 28 years of maladministration - it is for different issues. Information was withheld from the Government and from me and that is not acceptable to me."
A report on the matter, which she had asked Mr Kelly to carry out and which she then presented to Government on December 14th, "was not accurate, it was not complete, and that was the basis on which we made decisions, including the one on retrospection".
Mr Kelly, who will now become chairman of the Higher Education Authority, was not available for comment yesterday. He takes up his new post next month.