Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will indeed.

I thank the Minister of State for being here and taking this important question on the support the State needs to give to people going through IVF treatment. I brought it up for a couple of reasons. It is very important and we, as a Government, have made a commitment to the people in this State to support them through IVF treatment, just as other EU countries do. The Bill brought forward is called the assisted human reproduction Bill 2017. We are one month away from 2022. Time is not on people's side when it comes to trying to have baby. So many people I have spoken to are going through treatment or are considering going through treatment and they always talk about two elements as part of that process of trying for a child - the emotional and the financial.

The emotional side of things, especially when people find out, is a real roller coaster from the start because they have to absorb the information. They question why it happened them. Cost does not really come into it at that point. It is more about understanding. In fairness to clinics throughout the country, they offer a free counselling service to people when they find out this information, which is welcome. However, many people are just not in the position to be able to talk about it openly.

When one wants to start going down that route of IVF, one needs to do other things beforehand, such as taking tablets that need to be kept in the fridge. Then there is the obvious issue of privacy. When one has guests over and they are going to the fridge to get something, one does not necessarily want them to see tablets one might be taking for something private. There is a constant whirlwind of emotion for a couple going through IVF.One can then look at the financial side of it which is hugely important. Normally people have a discussion about whether they can afford it, how many times will they do it and whether they are willing to borrow to have a child. I spoke to a person who said they will spend every single euro they had to have a child. That is how much they want it. However, there is a knock-on effect to that. If someone is willing to spend every single penny he or she has to have a child it means if he or she is lucky enough to have that child then he or she is struggling from the start because he or she must repay a massive loan to have a child. When many people have children they discuss whether they are in a position in their lives to be able to afford to have a child. If you are in the situation of going through IVF, your discussion is about whether you can afford to try to have a child, not whether you can afford to have the child afterwards. Thus, from the very start you are in a position of being behind everyone else because you have had to spend so much money to actually be fortunate enough to have a child, and that is if you are lucky.

We as a State need to be able to provide those people with a financial service. Women and couples cannot wait any longer. As I said, time is not on their side. In 2017 the Government made a commitment to support families and couple through IVF. The legislation was supposed to be passed last year. When we talk about legislation we always compare ourselves to other EU countries. There are only two EU countries that have no state support for IVF, and they are Ireland and Lithuania. We only need to look across the Border. In the UK a person can get three treatments of IVF free of charge. It is a failure of us as a Government and as a State that we have citizens of this country who must go abroad to get a service they should be allowed get here. We as a Government support families and children in an awful lot of ways, like maternity and paternity care, but on this we are really letting people down. I am very interested in hearing the Minister of State's response.