John Whelan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I support Senator Colm Burke's call for a debate with the Minister for Health on the issue of pharmaceuticals and the cost of drugs. Big pharmaceutical industries were busy last week in peddling their propaganda and trying to suggest jobs were being lost owing to the Government's policy on purchasing. Will they tell us how many people have lost their lives or have had their lives damaged as a result of their pricing policies? The cost of medicines continues to be exorbitant and we need to explore why that is the case. It is absurd that people are going on holidays to Spain and bringing back a six-month supply of medicines. While I am a full supporter of the vaccination and immunisation programmes, we have to be very careful. We had a situation in the case of the pandemics and swine flu vaccine where the HSE made the terrible error of indemnifying GlaxoSmithKline from any responsibility. Today, families are living the terrible consequences of that decision, with children having contracted narcolepsy. It is an important debate that we need to have.

I commend the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Alex White, for signalling that he intends to bring a memo to the Cabinet tomorrow to ensure large sports events of national importance such as the Six Nations rugby championship will remain free to air and not be put up for grabs by the highest bidder. I would also like to see the Minister discuss the latest - it was not a U-turn - about-turn of somersault proportions by EirGrid in the roll-out of the national grid. Senators Denis Landy and John Kelly and many others across the floor have said we do not need to double the capacity of the grid or destroy the country through the erection of thousands of new pylons. Now all of a sudden Thomas Edison has come back into the EirGrid boardroom to tell it that it can undertake expansion and upgrading without Grid Link or Grid West. Apparently, we can have underground power lines in County Mayo but not in counties Laois and Meath. Does the technology require one to have the Taoiseach in one's constituency? The people of Ratheniska are entitled to the same rules and fairness from EirGrid. We need to know why it did this about-turn. We need to see exactly what is going on in terms of energy policy.