John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our various speakers. Another consequence of being old is that I can remember the story of HIV as a disease right from the beginning. I recall reading the first reports that came out of New York and Los Angeles about unusual infections among gay men and the occurrence of a very rare cancer called Kaposi sarcoma. I am also old enough to have, I believe, seen and diagnosed the first two cases of HIV-related illness in Ireland when I was a young doctor working as a non-consultant hospital doctor, NCHD, in the 1980s. I subsequently went to New York at a time when the city and the medical community was deeply in the grip of the consequences of HIV infection. This awful tragedy being visited on people was an illness which was mysterious in its origins and universally fatal in its outcome, and the prospects seemed so incredibly awful.

People need to reflect for a second. This is the greatest triumph of modern scientific medicine. What happened with HIV was unprecedented. In 1985 or 1987, when we knew we were dealing with a virus, and realising how miserably difficult viruses were to deal with because we cannot treat them with antibiotics, no living person - no rational doctor - would have imagined that within five or six years the life expectancy for this illness would be so dramatically transformed. It is important that we record this, the greatest modern scientific achievement.

My questions are for Dr. Holohan. How many genitourinary medical consultants per head of population do we have in the Republic of Ireland? What are the figures for the UK? What is the average figure for most European countries? How do we compare with North America? What is the average waiting time to be seen electively in a genitourinary clinic for a non-urgent consultation?