Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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I welcome our guests and thank them for their responses and a number of questions arise.

How would our guest speakers rate water fluoridation as a fundamental support to good general health and dental hygiene? How does one then specifically respond to the lobbyists who are opposed to it, as and when required?

How are specific groups targeted such as, for instance those in the workplace, that is, people who are at work, or work for most of the day and are not available during the practitioners' working day? They then neglect their dental care until it becomes a serious matter. We all attend to it then, when it is probably too late. Have our guest speakers found a particular means to contact people, maybe in the workplace or by some other means, through, for example, the sporting areas? There are continuous contacts in the sporting areas due to injuries, but apart from the injuries area, how is contact made with that cohort of people of a certain age group who may have particular issues?

Has an oral health system been devised whereby cases that are serious or likely to become more serious can be caught at an earlier stage?

On the issue of the Irish Dental Association, without wishing to go over the issue that already has been raised, but would greater interaction with the Irish Dental Association be considered or for the association to interact with the groups represented here? Should an established structure be put in place whereby a situation would not then arise where the association was progressing on a particular route while the groups present here were progressing on a parallel but different route? How will the bodies present here address the sort of crossover that may be necessary?

Is there any certainty as to the provision of access to all those most likely to be in need of assistance right across all the socio-economic groups, and if not, how is this to be addressed, given the particular importance of dental and oral hygiene?

Together with the answers to these earlier questions, can the witnesses address the extent to which women of childbearing age have ready access to and contact with the dental services in order that their progress and the value and quality of the support that they receive can be monitored, and as to how their particular health situations in and out of pregnancies may be affected by a lack of adequate attention?