Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank all of our guests in the Visitors Gallery. I will list the organisations because it is important to show the breadth of the voluntary organisations that do such amazing work when it comes to supporting women and breastfeeding. We have Friends of Breastfeeding Ireland, Baby Feeding Law Group Ireland, Bainne Beatha, Cuidiú, the Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland, Pavee Point and La Leche League, which also does huge work in the area of voluntary support.

That brings me to my first point. We are heavily reliant on the voluntary sector when it comes to supporting women. Breastfeeding is often quite an emotive topic. Over the past couple of days, as I have been walking around Leinster House, many politicians, both men and women, have shared their personal stories with me. Everybody has a personal story when it comes to how they feed their children and the kind of supports they feel they did not get. Journalists who I have spoken to over the past couple of days also shared their stories. This is an important day and I believe this is the first motion on breastfeeding to come to the floor of the Seanad.

It is important to point out that this is fundamentally about choice. How people feed their infants and children is a matter for themselves. However, what is important is that the State supports that. Some 62% of women start breastfeeding. Within a couple of days of women leaving hospital, however, that figure drops to 37%. It almost halves and then falls to 31% by month three. That is shocking and it is one of the lowest percentages in the world. We have to ask ourselves why that is. There are a number of factors involved but one is that some time ago we lost the tradition of breastfeeding. We lost that culture and it is important to bring it back. That starts at the very earliest age. We have a young man in the Gallery who supports breastfeeding mothers when they come to his house for the meetings of Friends of Breastfeeding.

This starts in the education system. Many people do not have the experience of having been breastfed themselves or having mothers or significant others in their lives who have that breastfeeding experience. So much of what happens in our lives as mothers is about a network. That is what the voluntary organisations provides and that network is missing from many people’s lives.

The low breastfeeding rates do not even touch the surface when it comes to some sections of Irish society. Looking at the Traveller community in particular, Pavee Point, which has done huge work on this, has found that only 2% of women in the Traveller community breastfeed. We have to be honest with ourselves. What has happened to date has not worked. There has not been enough work and some of it is a little bit cynical.

I have spoken about the formula industry in the House many times. Ireland is a large exporter of powdered milk. It exports formula milk all over the world. That has a devastating impact, apart from anything else, on some of the poorer nations across the globe, which is why the motion refers to the importance of ethical considerations. It also means that we have a lobby group and an industry that is putting vast amounts of money into advertising formula and free formula in hospitals. I was delighted that the Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, was very much on board when we asked her to include a measure in the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill to restrict advertising of formula.

It is important to note again at this point that this is not to say that those who formula-feed are doing anything wrong. However, there is something wrong when an industry goes out of its way to heavily market towards a vulnerable group. In the middle of the night, someone struggling to breastfeed who looks up supports for breastfeeding will see an advertisement for formula, which is not what she is looking for. This is about supporting a person’s journey in breastfeeding.

I have spoken to many people over the past year when working on this and doing other work on breastfeeding. One message that has come back very strongly is that we need to have a proper joined-up approach. We need more lactation consultants and I hope the Minister of State will give us information as to where the lactation consultants are that have been promised. We also need to make sure that every touch point a woman has in her journey also has that expertise on breastfeeding. Some public health nurses are doing great work but we have other public health nurses who do not feel they are qualified or are being supported by midwives and GPs with the information they are giving. There is a referral system in place but when somebody goes to their GP looking for support with mastitis, as I have in the past, or something else related to breastfeeding, the first answer that comes back is “Well, sure, use a bottle”. That might be the only contact somebody has because it can be cost prohibitive to visit a lactation consultant.

We have a lack of equality in our system where when it comes to issues related to women’s health, in particular, we are supposed to pay for it whereas other types of healthcare are delivered through the public healthcare system. At the moment, there is a postcode lottery and there is also a lottery based on how much money one has. That is just not good enough and it has to change.

The motion refers to the milk bank. There is only one milk bank on the island of Ireland, in Fermanagh, and it struggles for funding all of the time. Our hospitals rely heavily on it. Having spoken to people, I understand there are a few issues with it, one of which is that the level of donations it receives means that prescriptions for donated breast milk are only available to women who have a premature baby.We need to look at expanding that so people who have children in critical care, for instance, and others would have access to those donations. It is also important to look at opportunities to have such a bank in the Republic of Ireland.

I thank the Government for the steps that have been taken to date but it is important to say that it is not enough. We have not seen all of the required lactation consultants come on stream. I will go back to where I started with the voluntary organisations. Having been involved in two such organisations and having supported and run breastfeeding support groups in my own house and elsewhere, I know that one thing that bothers people is the cost of finding space to run breastfeeding support groups. For that reason, the motion proposes that we use all of our healthcare clinics to provide space for these groups, which are doing hugely important work. It makes sense to do that because many of them are being funded by the HSE, so why would they not be able to use the spaces available? Furthermore, they are not being funded to the level that they need to be funded, as the motion points out.

I will be returning to this topic again and again because, as the Minister of State knows, it is something I feel very passionately about. It is really important that we, as public representatives, keep banging on the door to get all of the changes that we need implemented. It is also important that we work on a cross-party basis. This Chamber has demonstrated an ability to work on a cross-party basis to achieve our goals for women in this country.