Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)

In the past two weeks we have seen the very concept of vaccination being undermined by the incumbent Secretary for Health and Human Services in the United States.

It is at times like this that the science-led approach to vaccination we have in Ireland is so important.

The HPV vaccine was first made available to teenage girls in 2010 and subsequently provided to teenage boys from 2019. The Tánaiste might have been health Minister at the time. In 2022, the HSE ran a campaign to provide the vaccine to young women and men who had missed the vaccination when they were in school. The campaign was named after Laura Brennan, a young woman who campaigned to raise awareness of the HPV vaccine and who died from cervical cancer. The scheme was regarded as a success and it was expanded in 2023.

The programme for Government, published in January, pledges to extend the Laura Brennan HPV catch-up vaccination programme to anyone under 25 years who missed the original vaccine. I have been trying to find out when this new programme is going to be rolled out but nobody will tell me. I have been on to the Department of Health with parliamentary questions and I have had replies from the HSE. Each time, I am being told about other stuff: I am being told how important the HPV vaccine is, which I know. I am being told about a new scheme targeting young Traveller and Roma people, which is great, but there does come a stage when one feels that somebody is deliberately not answering the question because they know that the answer is not going to be popular.

The Irish Cancer Society has also raised the status of the catch-up scheme with officials. It was suggested to it that a broad catch-up campaign could undermine the initial take-up of the vaccine by schoolchildren, and that there are some international studies to back up this point.

In order to try to clarify the matter, I raised the future of the Laura Brennan HPV campaign with the Taoiseach on 21 May. He said it was a fair question and he would ask the Department of Health to come back to me. I have not heard anything since.

Could the Tánaiste answer three questions for me today? Is the Laura Brennan HPV catch-up programme going ahead, as was committed to only six months ago in the programme for Government? If it is going ahead, when will it go ahead? If it is not going ahead, could we get a clear statement from the Minister for Health about the rationale for it not going ahead, and why we are abandoning a programme that everyone felt was working effectively to protect young people in Ireland from the scourge of HPV-related cancers?

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