Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. I commend my colleague Senator Kyne on drafting and bringing forward this motion. It is excellent and aptly timed. I reiterate the asks. The idea that your probability and possibility of surviving cancer is dependent on where you live, your socioeconomic grouping or your geographical location is awful. It should not be that way in 2024.It is shocking that there would be any sort of disparity in treatment and access to treatment.

There are key things that the Senator has outlined in the asks, for example, the issue of vaping. The piece I do not understand is that we can have such a widespread product that is on the increase in its use but there is no standard. There are shops and the products are sold at every possible outlet, yet there are no standards and no moves to ban them. What are we going to find? Are we going to find in 30 years time that we look back and there will be a generation that has been affected? Will it be like asbestos or smoking? We need to move more quickly with regard to our attitudes to vaping.

I also want to raise the issue of children with particular skin types and issues such as moles, skin tags and so on. If someone brings a child to the GP and asks for them to be mapped so their consistency or difference can be measured, the waiting list for that is anything up to two years in Dublin, if they are lucky. That is not okay if there is something going on. Parents are not in a position to decide if they have the knowledge or competence to know whether their child is predisposed to developing skin cancer.

That brings us on to the whole topic of skin cancers. Senator Lombard spoke eloquently about lotions. The fact is lotions are prohibitively expensive. If someone is in a particularly disadvantaged socioeconomic group, what are the chances that they are going to pay the prices that have to be paid for skin lotion? Lotions should be accessible. I would venture to say that they are like period products and there should not be any disadvantage for people who cannot afford them. Lotions to protect children’s skin should be as freely and frequently available as the dispensing of sanitiser in public bathrooms across our city and country.

The probability of developing skin cancer is high but there are issues even for those who have skin cancer. I have people close to me with skin cancer and their treatment has been postponed on three occasions in one instance and on two occasions in another. There is clearly a delay in the roll-out or there is understaffing, and that is in Dublin where, allegedly, everything is much better.

I do not understand how we still have sunbeds, how people can rent them to their homes and how people are going to salons. Why did we not shut them down a long time ago? Again, there is a slowness to react. As with vaping, there is a knowledge that this is doing harm yet we are slow to react. It is something we need to address and treat with the urgency it deserves. Our responses are way too slow.

Where someone is in the system, there is no doubt it is exceptional. The support of families where cancer is terminal is extraordinary. The work of the Irish Cancer Society is extraordinary and the level of support it gives to a family is amazing. However, that is due to a lot of fundraising and work that goes on outside the services of the State. Outside of our own health service, we are reliant on the work of others. All the support that can be given to the Irish Cancer Society, I believe it deserves that and all the rest of it, twofold.

I want to address the Leave Our Leave campaign. We need to address this issue as a matter of urgency because there is a disparity. If someone is on maternity leave or long-term sick leave, there is a disparity in how entitlement to holidays is calculated. There are real employment law issues that need to be addressed. If women are forced to sacrifice their maternity leave with their child, then they do not have the same protections, in particular if they are going into the latter part of an extended leave and are reliant on reasonable accommodation in going back to work. There is a lot of employment law within that where women are being disadvantaged. I am surprised it has not become an equality case at this stage. We need to act on it. Senator McGahon has given a very short and quick answer. There is no reason it cannot be acted upon.