Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We now find that in some cases we are still paying up to 24 times more than what is being paid in the UK, while in other cases it is ten or 11 times more than what is paid in the UK. I ask the Leader to invite the Minister to the House to give an explanation for that. If we are transferring to generic drugs, at the very least we should not pay any more than what is being paid in the UK.

The leader of the Labour Party group, Senator Bacik, raised the matter of the need for legislation on the surrogacy issue. We are now allowing the Judiciary to become the legislators because we are not reacting fast enough to issues. Two weeks ago I published the draft Bill on missing persons. I ask that the Leader would communicate with the Department and the Minister for Justice and Equality to determine whether we could start the process of debating that Bill in this House rather than waiting on the Department to produce one. A detailed Law Reform Commission report running to 160 pages has been published. The evidence is there. We should not park that report while we wait for a Department to produce a Bill. The Bill was drafted and is published, and we should get on with debating it. If the Department wants to amend it, it can do so but we should not park it for three or four years.