Tom Clonan (Independent)

Apologies I was not here earlier as I was at the disability matters committee meeting. If any aspect of my question has already been dealt with I apologise in advance. As we have heard, every family in Ireland has been impacted by cancer. I lost a sister to breast cancer when she was 43. She was very unlucky as she had a very aggressive tumour. My mum passed away from cancer. I had an encounter with it myself and I was very successfully treated by Dr. Pat Ormond in St. James's Hospital.

I am very grateful for that. In all of our experiences with those pathways, two of which were in St James’s Hospital, the oncology teams were absolutely amazing. In particular, the psychological supports that my sister got they were really useful, especially with the long goodbye, when a person knows she is going to die and leave two young sons. Ironically, one of them is now doing postgraduate medicine. Go figure. I hear it reiterated, and this is not a criticism of the teams, that we have suboptimal outcomes for cancer in the Republic, that by European standards we have less positive outcomes than they have in other European countries. Can the witnesses comment on that generally? Is there something specific we can do as public representatives to address that or to try to ameliorate that?