Dan Boyle (Cork South Central, Green Party)

If the Government wants to save face on this issue or if it believes it can finally present itself in a morally upright way, these amendments should be accepted. However, that is not likely to happen given that the Minister's amendments as presented to us contain nothing of that type.

To return to the central issue of why this Bill is so offensive to many who are suffering from hepatitis C and living with its effects, it is because of the act of justifying the condition through the existence of the ELISA test and the two other tests that can be taken in preference to it. Like most Members, I do not have a medical background and had to resort to a web search to find the definition of ELISA. I feared it was not an acronym but was named after a character from George Bernard Shaw's "My Fair Lady". However, it is an acronym, which stands for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The website on which I found this information explained how the ELISA test is used and whether it works. It explained the advantages of ELISA. What struck me was that the website stated: "ELISA tests are generally relatively accurate tests". If that sentence is not couched in equivocation, I do not know what is.

The Minister suggests——

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