Averil Power (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion. I thank the Minister for making himself available at short notice to debate it with us this evening. It is literally a matter of life and death. I thank Senator Daly for proposing the motion. I acknowledge the particular interest he has shown in the issue of organ transplantation in recent years. I am aware that it is a personal priority of his. I first raised this issue in April after I was contacted by someone who pointed out the delays occurring at that stage - four months into the year - in replacing Dr. Hickey and the other surgeon who left the team at Beaumont Hospital. I thought the delay was unacceptable at that stage, so it is nothing short of frightening at this stage that we have not been able to organise pancreas transplant operations in all that time. I understand that 15 donations have gone to waste because no surgical team was available to carry out the transplantation. That is deeply worrying and is putting lives at risk. Ms Ciara Kelly said in The Irish Timesthat she has been waiting three years for her second pancreas transplant and is getting weaker by the day. She is afraid that by the time the service is in place, she will be too weak to have the operation. That is genuinely frightening. Patients are really scared that they are not going to get this service.

I have a number of questions for the Minister, the first of which relates to appointments. I know he has said that a transplant service will be in place at St. Vincent's Hospital from September of this year. I would share the same concern as Senator Daly. If it has not yet been possible to appoint somebody, how can the Minister be confident that the service will be available in September? Can the Minister give us more detail of what is involved in the clinic that is supposed to take place on 24 July next? Is it just an assessment clinic? If so, in some respects it might just involve telling people what they already know, which is that they need to have a transplant as soon as possible. I would like to repeat a question that has already been asked. Why have we not been able to pay for treatment abroad? In the article I mentioned earlier, Ciara Kelly says she made such a request to the HSE but it refused to entertain it. I do not understand that because there is a procedure in place that enables us to send people to the UK and elsewhere to have urgent operations like this. As I have suggested, it could be too late by the time this facility is available to people like Ciara Kelly here. I ask the Minister to respond to those questions