Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We have only touched on many of the issues this morning such as how people lose their hearing. In their opening statement, the witnesses talk about the 300,000 adults. This was from a survey carried out in 2011. Thirteen years later, with the growth in the older population, the figure is probably far higher.

The witnesses spoke about how one in five older people have hearing aids. Alternatively, you could say that four out of five do not have them whichever way you want to look at it. I want to touch on the point that many of them only got them as a last resort. Could the witnesses touch on that?

Although the evidence is only anecdotal, many older people I know who have hearing aids leave them in a drawer. Do the witnesses have any figures relating to that? Hearing aids are quite expensive. Many people I talk to who leave them in the drawer said they found it very difficult to get used to them. At level one in the public system, a hearing aid has a hard piece of plastic that someone puts around his or her ear. People can pay huge prices if they buy hearing aids from a private provider. The person goes in on the basis of the provider giving him or her the best advice about which particular hearing aid is best for him or her. If a working group looks at this issue, it needs to look at making it far simpler to put a hearing aid on. You can get devices for listening to music so why can you not get something similar for a hearing aid? They are probably available if someone wants to listen to television. Some older people will only put one device in their ear. People say that is not good.

We did not touch on dementia and the importance of hearing with regard to that today. The fact that the brain fills in spaces in silence - it is amazing what the brain can do in this regard. Where would testing of children's hearing normally be carried out? Would it have been in schools years ago? We know that testing for other issues is not happening any more because nurses and others are not going into schools. Could the witnesses expand on that? The witnesses said there is a challenge regarding 10,000 children. What do the witnesses hope comes out of that working group?

What will the framework for the working group involve? What do the witnesses hope that will achieve? When the witnesses met the Minister eight months ago, he was agreeable to establishing it. It highlights how slow the system is when it comes to getting anything done. All of us in the Houses want to see movement in this issue so there is no political pushback and I do not think there is any pushback within the HSE but the system seems so grindingly slow when it comes to trying to get anything done. I wish the working group well. This committee will follow that up but I would be interested in hearing the witnesses' thoughts on how this could move on.