Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I thank the Deputy for giving me the opportunity to raise this matter again. It is fantastic to see the amplification and awareness of endometriosis in Ireland. That is part of what the framework is trying to do. We launched the framework on 18 October. I will set out the timeline again. This was in gestation for some period but it was becoming very clear that we were not meeting the needs or responding or perhaps hearing the acuity of what women were describing in terms of their pain, suffering and the impact on their lives. I also have to recognise the very many women in Ireland - I have met and discussed it with them - who received treatment that was absolutely satisfactory for them but perhaps they are at a different level of acuity. For the most complex and severe cases of endometriosis, it was not the case that we were meeting that need. We were not recognising it either in our public awareness of the impact on a person's life in terms of sport, attendance at work, opportunity to look for promotion and to participate in life in a normal way and how that impacts women and girls and can do so for a very long period of their lives. It is also not recognised that many women got surgeries that were successful here but at the more complex end were travelling abroad, paying considerable sums. In many respects they got all or much of that back through the cross-border directive or the treatment abroad scheme but after the fact.

It is not satisfactory to me that women should have had to do that and that the surgeries were not available to them here. Part of what we are trying to do is upskill what we are doing here and the complexity of surgeries. We are recruiting additional colorectal surgeons in Tallaght and Cork to try to enable more complex surgeries. We need to improve our understanding of the diagnostics and imaging. Endometriosis is very difficult to see sometimes. Different types can be very difficult to see. We need to do a lot better on that and upskill more broadly our capacity to do complex surgeries. In the meantime, I want to try to provide women with upfront support to those who need to travel abroad.

See this speech in context