Repaying people illegally charged for long-term State nursing home care will be "a huge logistical task", Minister for Finance Brian Cowen has said.
Mr Cowen told RTÉ last night: "We're in the process of deciding how we can now take on what is a huge logistical task ... There are 315,000 patients who went through the system in the last 27 years, 20,000 of whom are estimated to be still alive."
Sources close to Minister for Health Mary Harney indicated last night the Government was likely to invoke the statute of limitations in respect of reimbursements.
This means there will be no reimbursements to the families of patients charged illegally and who died before 1999.
When asked whether the Government would have to increase taxation to meet the cost of the reimbursements, the Tánaiste's spokesman said there was "no pot of gold" available to the Government.
Meanwhile, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin came under renewed pressure last night over his failure, when minister for health, to deal with the illegal charging of public nursing home residents.
Although Mr Martin said he was never informed by the Department of Health that the charges were illegal, Fine Gael said fresh evidence proved he should have asked more questions when in charge of the health system.
It emerged yesterday that Mr Martin described a highly critical ombudsman's report into the private nursing home subvention scheme in 2001 as a "wake-up call to the entire system".
The January 2001 report did not directly address the system of charging public nursing home patients for their care, but it identified a similar mechanism of levying illegal charges with regulations that were at variance with primary legislation.
In findings that mirrored the debacle over the charges to public nursing home patients, the 2001 report found that "maladministration had occurred on a significant scale".
Mr Martin told RTÉ in January 2001 that lessons should be drawn from the report to "make sure that this does not happen again".
It also emerged yesterday that the minister had answered parliamentary questions in 2001 about the practice of charging long-stay patients, but failed to identify that they were illegal.
While he said in one answer that the legislation governing the entitlement to nursing home care should be made more clear in the interests of equity and transparency, no action was taken.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said he was not surprised more information was emerging of questions being raised with Mr Martin about nursing home charges.
However, Mr Martin's spokeswoman stressed that the advice he received at all times was that the regulations were correct.
He was never informed that the charges were illegal, she said.
