Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank witnesses for their answers to the question of the anomaly in scans. We discussed the national maternity hospital last week and found that many hospitals were only scanning high-risk women. Professor Kenny from Cork stated that, in 1% of cases, there were structural defects in the non-risk group, amounting to 230 children born in this country every year with problems that were not identified pre-birth. There are catastrophic outcomes, while in other cases it all works out, but doctors and midwives are being put in a very awkward position where a child is born in a regional hospital with a problem that could have been identified prenatally. This causes huge stress to families, has bad outcomes for our children and costs a huge amount of money to limit the damage and transfer the babies to Dublin hospitals for surgery. It is a shocking statistic for a country this size and it is shameful. What is the HSE going to do about it?

There is a spiralling rate of neural tube defects, such as spina bifida and more severe forms of encephalopathy, but two thirds are preventable. One child per week is born with a severe birth defect that could have been prevented with adequate prenatal nutrition, one of the cheapest being folic acid which costs a pittance at €2 for a box of 50 to prevent the commonest preventable major congenital anomaly worldwide. It is a pity that the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Marcella Corcoran Kennedy, has left. Dr. Boylan, who is the expert and was here last week, said that the solution was fortification of foodstuffs with folic acid. People may not want it but it is a water-soluble vitamin and there no issues with men having it by accident as it is harmless to them. We have been talking about birth defects and scans but if we could prevent things from happening in the first place there would be knock-on effects for families and costs in the health service. In light of the €13.5 million spend to which Mr. O'Brien referred, can we not try to cut costs while at the same time having better outcomes for families?

How much public money is being spent in 2017 on disability services? Will the Minister of State give an indication of where the money is to be spent? Perhaps he could send us a note in reply. Will he also give us an update on the Grace case?

Mr. Woods spoke of portable solutions. Will he elaborate on those? I see caravans and trailers but maybe I am wrong. These things are short-term fixes to massive problems. The data show that we have huge demographic pressures and this seems to be a Band-Aid policy. I do not get why we are going for portable solutions and I find them quite disturbing. Pre-made units were brought into Crumlin some seven years ago.

They literally came on the back of a truck and they had to be plumped in. I believe that happened about seven years ago. Is that the sort of portable solution or is it akin to the library that used to come to us in the van years ago in Westmeath? I am wondering what is a portable solution. I ask people to use plain English in giving the answer.