Mr. Desmond Kenny:

I thank the Chairman. Just as the joint committee has had its first dog present at a meeting, members will now see me reading in a format they hopefully will not see many people using before this committee.

I sincerely thank both the Chairman and Deputy Mitchell O'Connor for inviting us here today, who, with the other members, paved the way towards our attendance.

This morning, we have given the joint committee a summary of our framework or road map for a joined-up strategy regarding eye health and associated support services. The coalition, on whose behalf we have presented, comprises all the people and organisations that can deliver on a strategy. The strategy can reduce to near elimination preventable blindness, as 75% to 80% of deteriorating sight loss can be arrested. We cannot create that strategy but we can deliver on such a strategy. We can assure the joint committee of its multiple values in savings of €76 million per annum, as indicated by Mr. Keegan, to a health service under severe financial pressure. We also can assure the joint committee that the strategy guarantees an improved independent lifestyle for people in their older years.

As people live longer, the eye diseases of aging must be combatted. There is no inevitability that sight loss has to darken the last years of old age. We all have relatives or know people whose sight is, to use the usual euphemism, “not the best”.

The National Vision Coalition’s framework provides for a seamless pathway to people from their first visit to an optician to the offer of treatments in their local communities by optometrists and community ophthalmologists.

There is only a short window of opportunity from the time of the diagnosis of eye disease to achieve a full arrest of loss of vision. If the Government does not enlarge the framework to a strategy and sees the roadmap of the coalition as leading to cost-effective services, the result will be the unnecessary and scandalous loss of eye-sight in hundreds of thousands of ageing people. When I had my childhood accident in the mid-1950s cortisone was not widely available. Had it been in more general use, I would not have been blinded in my right eye as a result of cross-infection from the blinding injury in my left eye. The treatments for today’s eye diseases are known and can be made more widely available at a fraction of the cost of the €76 million to which Mr. Keegan referred. Those savings could be adopted and made into a national vision strategy.

Today’s blindness is unnecessary. Where it does happen, support services such as those offered by Fighting Blindness, Guide Dogs for the Blind, Child Vision and NCBI can restore or give a new and different form of independence to people like myself. Please do not have people reach into our services unnecessarily because the State will not invest in eye health. The coalition consists of organisations and bodies which are joining our efforts in making a case we know has the sympathy of the Minister for Health. I ask the committee to offer more than sympathy for our cause by helping us to get the Government to deliver on a national vision strategy.