Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

While I do not have a figure on the numbers involved, it is anticipated that between 6% and 8% of the population is affected by a rare disease. Support is provided for many rare diseases, for example, haemophilia. In a constrained budgetary environment it is difficult to make choices where one product may help 1,000 people and another product only ten people. I have had a good engagement with Dr. Barry White and we may ring-fence a sum of money each year to be allocated to budgets for rare diseases. This would avoid the challenge such budgets face from disease groups with much larger numbers of patients.

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