Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

The total market for generic drugs in Ireland is €300 million. Unless we got the drugs for free, we could not get more than €300 million. If they gave us all the drugs for free, we would get €300 million. Deputy Reilly constantly states, when the information is at his disposal, that we would save hundreds of millions of euro by simply introducing reference pricing. We are introducing the legislation this year and it will save an extra €7 million this year. I have taken a couple of hundred million euro in costs out of the drugs bill and Deputy Reilly has opposed it. He would not even stand up to the pharmacists when we were reducing costs in the way they were remunerated. I will not take any lecture from Deputy Reilly about drugs because he opposed all of the changes we made.

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