Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcomed yesterday's debate on succession. It is something very close to my heart and I believe the debate went very well. There was cross-party support for a change in the legislation.

I wish to address the issue of maternity restrictions. I will not say that it is becoming boring at this stage because it is still so traumatic, and we hear new stories every day. We carried 1,000 stories into Leinster House yesterday from mothers and their partners on how difficult this past couple of years have been. As I stood outside Leinster House yesterday one of my own family members was out there while heavily pregnant. It sends shivers down my spine to think that there are continuing restrictions. The Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, addressed the issue yesterday but, with respect, at the very least we need a timeline. I simply do not understand why we are continuing to see these restrictions when the vast majority of Government and Opposition Members are calling for a lifting of restrictions. It simply has to happen. The Minister put it quite well when he spoke in the Seanad yesterday. He said that if it was men who were giving birth these restrictions probably would not be in place and we would actually have a healthcare system that was set up to put women, or men in that case, at the forefront.

This brings me on to another issue in women's healthcare about which I am passionate, that is, menopause care. I welcome the commitment to set up specialist menopause centres across the country. Having engaged with the Irish College of General Practitioners, I am aware that training for GPs in general does not include menopause healthcare as part of the core training, nor does the training include contraception, as I discovered from the Irish Family Planning Association. Both of these areas need to be brought into core training for GPs so that one does not have to go to specialist services for an initial visit and can get the correct information from any GP in any part of the country, and then by all means be referred to specialist care.

Those are a couple of matters I would like to see in the budget. It is not a huge expense but it means an awful lot to all of us here who have advocated on this issue.