Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North-Central, Fianna Fail)

The Minister will probably appreciate that I am going to raise one of my favourite topics: rare diseases. I thank her for meeting a group of us last week. We appreciated her time. As I said to her privately, I am encouraged about the direction this could be moving. However, I want to come back to the issue of early access. Thanks to Senator Costello, we had a group in a few weeks ago who suffer from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and the Minister’s party colleague Deputy Aird had a group in with MLD in the past. We are going to keep having these cohorts of patients in periodically, looking for a either a drug or a treatment, because the system is inherently broken. It was Simon Harris who said, back in 2017 or 2018 when he was Minister for Health, the reimbursement process is broken. The one challenge I would like to see the current Minister take on is redrawing or reconfiguring, or possibly adding another strand to how we assess drugs for reimbursement in this country. Could she outline what she plans to do in the short term?