Health authorities were given specific warnings about Leas Cross nursing home and serious inadequacies in the inspection regime there nine months before a TV programme exposed the abuse of elderly people in the home, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny told the Dáil.
Mr Kenny also criticised the Government's failure to introduce legislation to establish an independent health inspectorate on a statutory footing despite a promise to do so in the wake of the RTÉ Prime Time Investigates documentary in May last year.
The programme detailed the "shocking conditions" in the north Dublin nursing home, which has since closed, and it was a "national scandal that brought shame on this country, in which the elderly, the sick and the frail were exposed to degrading and horrific treatment".
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern pointed out, however, that all the issues were being "closely monitored", and while the inspectorate was not yet on a statutory footing, the Health Service Executive already had a "large number of staff involved in the supervision and examination of standards in our nursing homes".
While he did not have a date for the legislation, the draft heads were at an advanced stage.
He insisted that a system was in place under the Health (Nursing Homes) Act.
A Government spokesman later said that the amending legislation would be incorporated in the Health Bill, and draft heads would be before the Cabinet in about a month.
During leaders' questions, Mr Kenny asked the Taoiseach why he was "in a position to say last May, June and July that this was a priority for legislation, yet it does not now appear in any of the Government's own programmes".
He said that the Tánaiste was "well able to bring in emergency legislation to claim back retrospective payments from money taken from people in long-stay geriatric homes". However, the issue of the standards in nursing homes had not been addressed with the same sense of urgency by this Government.
Mr Kenny said his parliamentary colleague Fergus O'Dowd had informed him that there were "serious questions about the adequacy of the existing inspectorate regime within the HSE". He said that an independent review of Leas Cross had found that it should not have been registered in the manner it was "or even registered at all".
"The report found that nine of the 11 double bedrooms in Leas Cross were below the required standard. That means half the rooms originally used were below the required size." He added: "We can only speculate on how much suffering the elderly in that place had to endure."
Quoting the remark that "growing old is like being increasingly penalised for a crime you have not committed", Mr Kenny said: "The Government has had massive resources at its disposal but has wasted obscene amounts of money in many areas."
This was not simply an ordinary legislative matter, it concerned the "quality of life of those who built this country".
Mr Ahern said that the Government had invested enormous resources in "our older people, as well as looking after them in terms of welfare payments".
He added: "We invested an additional €110 million in the recent Budget, a sum of €150 million at full cost, for packages to help elderly people."
The Bill was being prepared, but legislation was not the beginning and end of the matter, and all of these issues were being "monitored closely".
