Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

A number are under pressure, but not because we are not paying them much. By international standards, we are paying them a great deal. However, many pharmacies, particularly in urban areas, got caught up in the property boom. Some of them paid an exorbitant amount to enter a business that the health service cannot sustain or be expected to sustain. I have considerable sympathy for those pharmacists, but that is a separate item from the manner in which the State reimburses pharmacies.

Reimbursement under the GMS increased from €748 million in 2004 to €1.2 billion in 2009. It is because of my great respect for pharmacists that there will be a regulatory body under the new legislation. Until we passed the 2007 Act, pharmacies were effectively unregulated. They operated under an Act that was 180 years old. The pharmacy interests, particularly the profession, were beating down my door and the doors of many of my predecessors because we needed modern legislation to regulate their profession, as they did not have the capacity to take action where there was inappropriate behaviour in the profession.

The regulatory body has decided that pharmacists should have a separate space in which to talk with patients.