Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I am glad the Deputy has acknowledged that the issue is the availability and cost of these products. They were once confined largely to chemists and like many chemist-based products in Ireland, particularly in the past, could be extraordinarily expensive. People involved in doing the family shopping will now see that nearly all stores, particularly the big multiples and low-cost discount supermarkets, have such foods available at much cheaper prices than heretofore. People with special dietary needs can obtain specific supplements via the supplementary welfare allowance scheme. That is a much better way of approaching it because the numbers availing of this scheme, as the Deputy will see from the statistics, have fallen dramatically. This is due to the availability and lower prices of such foods in the kind of stores I have mentioned.

See this speech in context