Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will come in there, if the Deputy does not mind. That €3.2 billion is a huge spend, as the Deputy said. It is a huge proportion of our budget. We have 1.6 million people with medical cards and 185,000 discretionary cards, so 1.8 million people have medical cards. A huge proportion of those are older people who would depend very much on their medical card for drugs. That also includes the drugs payment scheme, where families can pay up to €80 a month for the drugs they get from the pharmacy. All of that is factored in as well. We are supporting a huge proportion of people in the country to get prescription drugs free of charge.