I want to draw the attention of the House to subparagraph (b) of subsection (1) which provides that:
Regulations may provide for disqualifying a person for receiving injury benefit or disablement benefit for any period not exceeding six weeks, or for suspending proceedings on any claim for, or on any payment of, injury benefit or disablement benefit, if the person fails without good cause—
(b) to submit himself from time to time to appropriate medical treatment for the relevant injury or loss of faculty.
Then we are told in section 33 that:
... "medical treatment" means medical, surgical or rehabilitative treatment (including any course of diet or other regimen), and references in this Act to a person receiving or submitting himself to medical treatment shall be construed accordingly.
What the Minister is seeking in subparagraph (b) of subsection (1) of section 31 is power to make regulations to provide that if a man does not want to submit himself to a surgical operation he will starve him out for six weeks and compel him to submit. That is the power the Minister is seeking and there is no equivalent power contained in the workmen's compensation code which we are now abolishing. The Minister will, of course, say that the power to starve a man out, to starve his wife and his children, if he is obliged to undergo an operation, will never be exercised when the workman has good cause for refusing an operation. We have all seen the workman in the courts whose doctor has advised him to have an operation, the doctor of his employer has advised him to have an operation but the workman says: "No, I will not have an operation, I prefer to put up with my disability, I prefer to stay as I am." If you talk to the workman he says: "I am afraid of an operation, I would not like an operation." The operation may be for, say, treatment of a slipped disc, a common enough injury from which workmen suffer.
If a workman comes and says he has a certain premonition about the outcome of the operation or that for other reasons he refuses to undergo the operation, the Minister says that he will starve him out for six weeks and "We will make you undergo the operation or else you can look at your wife and children not getting benefit for up to six weeks." That is what we are substituting for the existing workmen's compensation code which, as I say, was not the most perfect code but we ought to understand what we are putting in place of it.
There was power under the old code to take into account a man's reasonable fears to undergo an operation or to take medical treatment. Sometimes people will be downright unreasonable because they do not want to submit themselves to an operation. We all know of people who do not want to go to a dentist, a doctor or a hospital. The last thing they want to do is to go under an operation where they give themselves over body and soul to a surgeon. If a man is allergic to surgical operations the Minister says: "It does not matter; my Deciding Officer will starve you for six weeks and will make you undergo the operation. At the end of six weeks if you have not undergone the operation and you are still alive we will pay you compensation."
The Minister will say that you cannot operate this kind of code under the Social Welfare Acts. He will say: "We cannot operate in this impersonal way to the complete satisfaction of the contributors. We could not work in this impersonal way if we did not have this kind of power." This is all reminiscent of the attitude of employers in Dublin in 1913 who, in order to make the employees suffer, did what they considered was good for them. They decided to starve them out. I cannot think the Minister will persist in this power in the anniversary of 1916 when we have heard so much about the work of James Connolly and James Larkin.