Denis Naughten (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Fine Gael)

I congratulate my colleague, Deputy Reilly, for bringing forward this Bill and having the Government accept it. It is a great honour to have one's Private Member's Bill accepted in the House. I hope that Deputy Reilly is more successful than I have been when a Bill was accepted on Second Stage but the Government blocked it on Committee Stage. I hope this Bill will go through Committee Stage and be enacted into law. A period of reflection is being considered, as proposed by the Minister for Health and Children, but I hope this will not delay the passage of very valuable legislation.

I wanted to speak on the Bill because of a comment I heard on the radio last Sunday week. In a news report, the Government indicated it would give unlimited indemnity to the manufacturers of the swine flu vaccine to ensure the companies involved would not be held liable for any possible adverse effects arising from the administration of the vaccine. What stuck in my craw about that media report was the comment attributed to the State Claims Agency, which stated the move for indemnity was essential to ensure it can pay out compensation to anyone who deserves it and to protect the taxpayer from fraudulent compensation claims. The reason I was so annoyed by that comment is that the State Claims Agency, along with various agents of Government, including the HSE, the Medicines Board and others, has been sitting on a committee since 2007, looking into the provision of a no-fault compensation scheme in respect of the administration of State-run vaccines over the past 30 to 40 years. This committee sat at the end of a very long process initiated five years previously by the then Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Micheál Martin, because Ireland was the only country in Europe that did not have a compensation scheme in place for people damaged by vaccines administered on behalf of the State. We are seven years further down the road since that Minister promised to look into this issue. I became involved because I know a number of the families around the country who have profoundly brain-damaged children. They firmly believe their children were damaged as a result of the State-administered vaccination programme in the 1960s and early 1970s.

I have debated this matter at length in this House. The State has admitted that in at least some of those cases, particularly with reference to 16, it offered a £10,000 ex gratia payment to the children involved in 1982 and 1984. That sum was supposed to deal with the long-term needs of those children. It is vitally important that the State should admit, for the first time, that children have been damaged as a result of the administration of a vaccine. The reason the State Claims Agency is involved in the provision of liability indemnity in respect of the current vaccination programme is that there is a risk. It may be a very small risk but it exists nonetheless and that fact has never been acknowledged in this State. It is the only state in Europe that has never acknowledged it.

One speaker after another has said, rightly, that we need honest and frank admission by medical professionals with regard to mistakes they make. In many cases such issues would not have ended up in the courts costing the State astronomical sums of money if there had been a basic admission in this regard at the start. That has never happened on the part of the State concerning the issue of children who were damaged by the State-run vaccination programmes.

The committee in question took oral submissions on 19 November 2007 and I gave oral evidence at that stage. The one thing I asked for was a quick decision on the matter. The parents wanted that because this has been going on for 30 years. I was given an indication by the group that it would make a quick decision and would make recommendations to the Minister on the matter. However, in December 2008 the Minister for Health and Children was still waiting for that report. She said she would have it very shortly and received it earlier this year. She indicated it was her intention to publish the report when she had deliberated on it. She informed the House of that on 19 May, yet by 16 September she was still considering the report and had made no decision. She said she would make a decision on it shortly.

It is frustrating. A week beforehand, in the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children, of which Deputy Reilly is a member, officials within the HSE and the Department said they were to introduce a compensation scheme for children who had received a toxic batch of whooping cough vaccine 40 years ago. That was the first acknowledgement from anybody on the State side with regard to that issue. It is greatly frustrating that there has been a cloak and dagger approach to the admission of a wrong that happened to these children over a long period. The frustrating thing for many people on the receiving end of problems with the medical profession is that there is no admission and nobody is honest and up-front in stating that a mistake was made and they are very sorry about it. The families whose children were damaged by the State vaccination programmes were told consistently and repeatedly by medical professionals up and down the country that the matter was all in their imagination, the child had been born with a profound disability and the vaccine had absolutely nothing to do with it. The administering general practitioners had kept grossly inadequate records and, as a result, those parents were not able to go down the road of taking a case against the manufacturers of the vaccine. The only exception was the case of Kenneth Best whose mother succeeded in gaining compensation.

Even at this late stage I urge the Minister for Health and Children to publish the report and publicly acknowledge that it is possible and, in all probability, likely that some of these children were damaged by the administration of the vaccine, that the State was grossly negligent in not ensuring full records were maintained either by the State or the GPs and that we must establish for once and for all a no-fault compensation scheme regarding vaccination programmes in this country. We are the only country in Europe that has not put a scheme in place. The State Claims Agency made its comments last Sunday week, using the argument that similar indemnity is provided in every other member state in the EU, including the United Kingdom. However, every other member state, including the UK, has a compensation scheme in place because people are damaged by vaccines administered by the State.

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