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

I thank the witnesses for coming in today and I apologise for them being delayed for so long this morning. The quote mentioned by Deputy O'Reilly was something I pulled from the statement last night as well when I read it. It is "we have found no substantive evidence of appropriate training, referral criteria, audit or accountability in published literature from the Irish chiropractic community." Reading around this, it almost suggests that there is no evidence. Perhaps the evidence is there but it just was not collated or given in the appropriate fashion.

Why is Ireland so different from other jurisdictions? I can only assume it is because there is no undergraduate university course for chiropractic services, so perhaps the profession does not have what pharmacists or physiotherapists have in the form of an academic body in Ireland providing the degree course. Therefore, we depend on people coming in with training from other jurisdictions. I completely understand concerns that people may have with ionising radiation X-ray units in clinics but I wonder is there any evidence that those units are not being monitored and manned properly, or that there is any risk to the neighbourhoods surrounding practices with such facilities? Will the witnesses indicate how many patients the group is seeing on a weekly or annual basis? They might deem this as taking a weight from the health service by dealing with them in their centres. I visited a chiropractic clinic recently and was very impressed by the professionalism of the set-up. It was what I would consider very progressive and like a large GP surgery. It was not just a fly-by-night operation and the person had practised for years.

Following on from the point on indemnity insurance to which my colleague, Senator Burke, referred, and he was referring to the actual machines, when it comes to something being missed, as can happen in any profession, what is the recourse for the patient? If an X-ray is taken of a lower back and if the issue is not mechanical but is, for example, cancer and that is missed, is there any example of what happens next? How is it regulated? Is there any regulation? Does it just go into the ether?

I looked at the regulations for here and the proposed regulations for the UK and I am concerned that we seem to be an outlier. Why can Ireland not match up with what the UK is doing? Do the witnesses have any suggestions as to how they, as a group, could get their house in order? They appear to be well trained and providing a good service, but somehow they operate in a grey area and perhaps will become extinct. Do they have any suggestions as to how, if we as a committee could feed back to the Minister to give the witnesses two or three years to sort out their housekeeping, they could assist us in this regard?