Peter Roche (Galway East, Fine Gael)

The witnesses are welcome. Like other speakers, I have a huge interest in the conversation that has taken place thus far. One of the things that strikes me about delays in providing a drug to people, whether they have been recently diagnosed or have been diagnosed for quite a while, is that they might then discover that somewhere, sitting on a shelf in a stock room there is a drug that could potentially change their lives. There are bureaucratic and convoluted processes and procedures and obstacles that are manufactured and there is a lack of will and sometimes of investment. There is absolutely no denying that economics should not come into it when it is about quality of life. Every family has had an experience or knows someone who is waiting for a life-changing drug. Imagine the torment and soul-destroying feeling people would have when they think there is potentially a drug, but they are looking at two or three years before they can get access to it. That is what I find difficult to understand.

I appreciate and respect the job Professor Barry has to do, but we are all aware of what happened when the pandemic came. Mountains were moved to get access to a drug which might have saved millions of lives around the world. It was done because there was a human or medical emergency. Every diagnosis is a medical emergency that deserves the same level of empathy, compassion and support in providing the drug that will give the patient quality of life. Quality of life is paramount in all this. Thankfully, we have pharmaceutical companies that are able to devise drugs in response to a diagnoses. They do so in the hope it may be the life-changing intervention patients require, yet access is an anomaly.

I would like to think we are all in this together because it is about people's well-being and lives and about early intervention and access. What does Professor Barry believe needs to change to have a better process under which people will have access?