Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I did not know that. I am sorry I did not. I am so glad the Deputy and I have the opportunity to describe the pain women face every day. As she said, it is like a knife fight inside you and yet she comes to the Dáil, working an extraordinarily demanding job, as everybody here knows. It is exceptionally physically and emotionally difficult and that is just the job. That is on top of all the things we bring to work with us. It has not been understood. The Deputy knows that better than me. She does not need me to explain that to her. I am glad we have a different understanding. I attended a fund-raising last night for a local rugby club and a gentleman came up to me to talk about his 28-year-old who had been in precisely the same situation for a very long time. The impact on women's participation in normal life has to be understood. Teenage girls cannot participate in sport and perhaps cannot sit their exams. There are women who have gone through university, doing phenomenal jobs in the workplace, taking significant periods off and are not able to explain or have that understood by their employer. This impacts women's lives. It is important that it be broadly understood and named. It is a series of cells that can move through the body with exceptional pain right through from pelvis, through the diaphragm up to their shoulders, thoracic region and into women's brains and eyes. It is exceptionally painful. The more we try to explain that pain women have been going through, it will be better understood. It helps me to generate urgency around improvement in services.

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