Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Tomorrow we will have the chance to debate the Bill properly. If we had not had that awful controversy and if we did not still have the taste of it, there is much about this Bill that nobody could but unequivocally welcome. I welcome it and recognise it as an attempt to provide insurance for people who would otherwise be uninsurable. It is a welcome piece of legislation, and, as far as it goes, generous and imaginative. I suspect that this is the first time in legislation that the unmarried partners of people ever got this level of recognition and acknowledgement. I take it from the Tánaiste's speech that there will be no gender distinction about partners, which is progressive and welcome. It would be ungenerous of me not to acknowledge that fact. I previously stood here and listened to a Minister for Social and Family Affairs deal with the Department's definition of cohabitation for the purposes of social welfare eligibility and he mentioned everything except for sex. Eventually he managed to slip in one reference to sexual relations at the bottom of a three-page definition of cohabitation. I am glad we have moved on and recognised the complex nature of human relationships.

I welcome the provision of health care services without charge, as the Tánaiste mentioned. I wish we had a universal provision of health care services without charge. Maybe now that the enlightenment has begun to spread we will begin to move in that direction because that is what a civilised society should have. No citizen of a civilised society should have to pay directly for any health care service he or she needs.

I admire but do not share the Tánaiste's faith in the scientific method. The scientific method is what it is. I refer to various diagnostic tests. As an engineer and therefore, to a degree, a scientist, I recognise the value of science and accept the scientific method. However the scientific method is experimental and its real genius is that nothing is certain. Everything is only as good as the experimental evidence and one accepts the theory until better evidence emerges.

The genius of science is that it continuously questions what is there. Church leaders and others were horrified by the scientific method when it came along because it implied universal scepticism about accepted wisdom when people asked why it was true. The answer was because it was always true. Then they asked for evidence. One seeks evidence and maybe it is not true. We worked out that the sun did not rotate around the earth because the evidence suggested the opposite. To a degree, the original enshrining of one test in the legislation reflected an extraordinarily naive view, to be charitable about it, of how science works. Diagnostic medicine is only one form of science. It can never be written in stone. As it is amended, future tests and diagnoses have been built into the Bill. It took a great deal of fuss to get us from a degree of certainty that one test would do to accept that several tests are necessary or acceptable and there may be better tests in the future.

Anybody who says there is only one answer to any scientific question, that something is absolutely clear in scientific terms or that science has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that something is true, is being disingenuous. Speaking as a scientist I do not know any laws of nature. We have only the best possible model at present. That might change next year or years after that. I do not teach students laws of nature. Instead I tell them "This is what works. This is the model that describes it. Use it for a while, it may change in the future". That is what legislation such as this should contain.

If one is to use quasi or pseudo-scientific methods of diagnosis one must recognise that they are only the best we have at the time. They may be inadequate, limited or wrong and leave people out. There are so many areas of human illness, particularly of a psychological or psychiatric nature, for which there is no agreed definition. One cannot prove that somebody is schizophrenic. One can run a series of tests leading to the conclusion that it is the most likely diagnosis but there is no scientific test which proves it. In this case, however, hopefully there is such a test.

I wish this Bill could have gone through the Houses in the tone and mood in which the central issue was debated. It is a matter of regret and it seems almost endemic in the Department of Health and Children that there must be a row about something extraneous that seems to many outside these Houses to have been slipped in, perhaps inappropriately, and definitely unnecessarily.