Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise an issue that has come to my attention through the national media and a number of representations I have received. I was approached by a couple, Michael Rynne and his wife, Jan. She was diagnosed with a blood cancer in 2011. It cannot be treated, but luckily she managed to get on a drug trial outside of the jurisdiction in Leeds that saved her life. She went from a 98% reading for cancer in her bone marrow down to approximately 1% because of a cancer drug that is not available in Ireland, even though it has been fully approved by European Medicines Agency, EMA.

Unfortunately, people like Jan are not responding to the Covid vaccine. She has received four vaccines. I have the permission of the couple to disclose this information. Jan has not developed any antibodies and as a consequence she is still shielding at home. She cannot see her adult children, who are in their 20s, for fear of contracting Covid because in the UK and Wales – we do not have figures for Ireland – 4,300 people with blood cancer died as a consequence of contracting Covid. If we extrapolate from those figures, given that we are a tenth of the size, we are talking about possibly 430 people. In England and Wales, 200 people with blood cancers have died of Covid because they cannot develop antibodies. The drug Evusheld was fully approved by the EMA in March this year, but is still not available to the 130,000 immunocompromised people in Ireland.

This ties in with an observation made by the Swedish Institution for Health Economics, which carried out a survey of European cancer survival rates. It found Ireland has the lowest rate of survival for cancer throughout the European Union, in particular for ovarian and breast cancer. These are issues that impact on women, 51% of our population. One of the key reasons it identified in this research was that, on average, once a new cancer drug has been approved by the EMA, it takes approximately one year for those life-saving drugs to be made available across the EU to people suffering from cancer. However, in Ireland it takes two years. The research found that hundreds of Irish people are dying unnecessarily because of delays.

I would like a debate on the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics and the corporate pharmaceutical unit in the HSE to find out why they are taking two years to do what everybody else in Europe does in one using the same best practice, governance and interrogation of the data. There is no good reason there should be such a delay and that people should suffer unnecessarily and die.