Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I fully support and agree with Senator Gallagher. It says a lot about eye care that we both tabled the same Commencement matter this morning.

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, to the House. I am aware of his commitment to this particular issue because we have spoken about it on many occasions.

It is a national embarrassment when politicians are taking photographs and putting them up on social media of buses going to the North with taxpayers and citizens going up there to have their cataracts done. We need to eliminate that practice. We need to ensure that it does not happen. Imagine the indignity of people from this country being photographed and being put on social media going to the North to have their eye conditions dealt with. We need to stop that. We need a national strategy for eye care.

We need to eliminate preventable blindness. Would the Minister of State believe that four out of every five people in this country who go blind do so unnecessarily? That means 80% of people who lose their sight in this country do so unnecessarily. They do so because they are not caught in time. They are not screened or operated on in time. The interventions do not happen on a timely basis. We need to eliminate that. It is not good enough.

Imagine if you closed your eyes, you had to keep your eyes closed and you had to walk around with your eyes closed forever, amen. That is what happens with people who lose their sight.

The one thing we can do in this country is ensure that people who have sight keep sight. There are people like me who were born without sight, have limited sight and are grateful for the amount of sight they have. That is unpreventable, but what is preventable is people who have full sight who end up losing their sight or becoming seriously blind or visually impaired because of the system, the HSE and untimely interventions.

I call on the Minister of State to deal with the waiting lists but, more importantly, introduce a national eye care strategy to eliminate preventative blindness.