Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologise if I some of the questions I intend to ask have already been covered. If they have, perhaps the witnesses can tell me and I can check the record. I am one of the 220,000 people who are living with the consequences of sight loss on a daily basis. While my loss of sight was not preventable, I agree with the coalition's aim of preventing as much as possible of the 75% of sight loss in this country that is preventable. Obviously, I have a deep personal interest in advancing this cause. I was pleased to facilitate a meeting between the coalition and the Minister. I am not sure whether it took place before or after Christmas. I know the Minister is committed to the principle of a strategy. The challenge for us is to make that happen. I would like to speak about my role in the Seanad in this respect. I hope that a Private Members' motion on this issue will be debated on 17 or 18 July and that the Minister for Health, whoever he or she is at that time, will reply to it. One has to be positive in hoping that certain commitments will be made during that debate. I would like Mr. Keegan and Mr. Kenny, who are welcome at this meeting, to comment on what is happening in other countries. How far behind other countries are we? I would be specifically interested to know to what extent the European countries against which we should be benchmarking ourselves have advanced this principle. We should be using and following them as an example.