Fiona O'Loughlin (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor McCarron and the team warmly for being here and for all the incredible work that they are doing.

I was listening to Professor McCarron on KFM a month ago when she was talking about the two-day conference that she was hosting. I just thought I would have loved to have gone and spent the two days and I spoke to the Chair then about the possibility of inviting her to appear before the committee.

I know of Professor McCarron's work with Kildare Down's syndrome association, with Rita and Gráinne, who are amazing women and have done so much. Obviously, they themselves are mums, but they have done so much in terms of the wider population there.

I have a brother with Down's syndrome, who is 49 and who is very much the centre of our home. He is very high functioning, thankfully. Talking about health, my mother thought that his eyesight was failing a little so my brother and I brought him to the optician and he got glasses. Then my mother noticed - he is living with her and she is 88 - that he was not really seeing and he was not reading. He always reads, but he was using his iPad and making the words quite large. I brought him back to the optician and said that maybe his glasses were there wrong ones. They were not, but they had totally missed that he needed cataract surgery urgently. I noted the difference when I brought him home from the surgery and he was out. When he took off the patch, he was actually touching leaves. He is very bright, and the fact he could not articulate that he could not see because he did not realise himself that he was having a problem really made me worry for those who do not have someone who can recognise the signs and pick up the pieces. My mother still gets very upset about it. He is great now, thank God.

In terms of access to care, only last week I met a family I know 40 miles from where they live. It transpired in our conversation that they could not get a dentist - Professor McCarron was talking about oral care - anywhere close to them. They felt lucky that they were able to go 40 miles. Parents are ageing. If this young man did not have the parents to bring him there, he would not have been able to go and get the care that he needed. It strikes me that within the system we have, we need to be able to do better in trying to ensure better health outcomes for, as Professor McCarron said, the preventable areas. When we talk about living with dignity and with pride and living your best life, which all of us should aspire to, we need to do better there.

Through working with the Special Olympics programme, I know that their health screening is excellent. I have been at world games and European games where the health screening, which is all done by volunteers, has been able to pick up in those from the less developed countries the need for and the provision of glasses and other aids. We always think it is better in Ireland and it is not necessarily.

One of the big issues that we have come up against in all the different groups that we meet is the lack of data. It is difficult to measure and to put programmes in place, but Professor McCarron has the data.