Mr. Brendan Lennon:

These are the people on the HSE's waiting lists accounting for the figure of 20,000. Regarding the length of time people can be told they might be waiting, we dealt with a lady about 18 months to two years ago who was told she would be waiting three years for an appointment, and she was in her 80s. This is ridiculous. Equally, though, there is an unknown waiting list of people out there too. The HSE is only catering for 30% of hearing aid provision. The other 70% is concerned with the wider public. We know a significant number of people have hearing loss and have done nothing about it yet. One of the primary reasons for this is that they do not have any money in their pockets. This is one of the issues.

Some 20% of people do not have PRSI eligibility, so they must pay the full cost. These might be people who were getting hearing aids from the HSE when they were children. They then left school and got a job. Three or four years later they might have needed to replace their hearing aids and, for the first time in their lives, found they had to pay for the cost themselves. I have a colleague in work who had to take out a credit union loan 20 years ago to buy her first set of hearing aids. She had been a hearing aid user. All of a sudden, then, her hearing aids stopped working and she was then faced with paying for her hearing aids.

We mentioned the HSE audiology review in 2011. One of the recommendations in that report was that young people who had hearing loss as children would have a lifelong entitlement to avail of audiology services from the HSE, but that has never been enacted. It is to be hoped Sláintecare will deliver this in time. Young people in their 20s and 30s, however, are faced with buying and paying for hearing aids for the rest of their lives. In terms of the cost we are talking about in this regard, it is like running a second car.