Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and I commend him on the publication of the women's health action plan. I wish to raise two issues. The first is the issue of free contraception for women aged 17 to 25. The Government has repeatedly said that programme will commence in August and I want to ask about that. We are just a couple of months out from that roll-out and I hope the Minister will be able to tell me how prepared we are for it. Have the regulations been signed to enable this to start in August? Will an information and publicity campaign start so that people know where to go and know about the roll-out? Has that been finalised so that people will know where they can get access to free contraception? There is a commitment on the training of medical professionals and I have heard there is a delay in rolling this out. Is that the case? Is the Minister confident that there is sufficient capacity in the system so that women will have access to their choice of contraception in all parts of this country? The Government stated this will commence in August and, therefore, can he confirm that women aged 25 on 1 August will be eligible to avail of free contraception to ensure they will not age out of the programme if it does not start until mid-August, when people are turning 26?

The other issue I want to raise is the fact that there is a national emergency in transgender healthcare in this country. There is a waiting list of up to ten years in the National Gender Service. Many identify this as a gatekeeping bottleneck. Up until recently the National Gender Service was refusing to engage with the trans community and it seems to have cut ties with NGOs. I wonder what that is about. Many trans people, including friends of mine, have taken to fundraising online and taking on debt to travel for hormone replacement therapy, HRT, treatment abroad. Many Irish trans people go to Poland and places that have been declared lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, LGBT-free zones to access the basic care they need and deserve. There is a commitment under the programme for Government on World Professional Association for Transgender Health, WPATH, standards and the National Gender Service is not following those standards. People are being delayed in accessing treatment and so they are being denied treatment. It is an emergency if the waiting list is approximately ten years long. I would appreciate any response to those issues.