Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I would like to think that arrogance is behind us. I would like to think that arrogance is beneath any Minister for Health, but unfortunately it was an arrogance we saw last week. It was regrettable that the Minister was calling out the ethics of the clinicians who brought those concerns to us, particularly when many of them gave enormous public service to this State while sitting on the 2005 Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction, about which Senator Seery Kearney spoke. It was the Tánaiste, Deputy Martin, who was Minister for Health and Children then. It was that long ago. There are clinicians who have sat at various committees with the Department of Health. There are clinicians who have sat at the committee during pre-legislative scrutiny and attended other committees in this Oireachtas. They have served our State well. They have acted in the public interest and done everything, whenever they were asked, to try to ensure we would have a comprehensive and best-practice set of laws in this country.

I go back to the substance of the amendment. Last week, the Minister said:

I want to assure everybody that no child will be excluded. If the treating doctors say that there is a risk to a child for any reason, whether a progressive condition, a non-progressive condition or a treatment he or she has to go through, that child will be covered. That is the policy position.

That may be the policy position and it may be the Minister's position, but I do not read it as the position in the legislation. If there is anything the past decades have informed us on, or if there are any lessons to take, the first is that we should absolutely trust the doctors but the second is that we need to provide certainty to those doctors. There are questions now and there needs to be legal clarity given to those patients, those children under the age of 18, who are currently undergoing gamete or reproductive tissue storage or preservation. If it is not included in this Bill, where stands that storage or preservation treatment for those children who have conditions which unfortunately and very sadly for them is bringing about an early menopause or is significantly impairing their fertility? Crucially, I would like to have that certainty in this Bill. I have very real concerns that we will be back here in September specifically dealing with the changes the Minister says he will bring. I take it in good faith that he is committed to doing so but time is of the essence and I do not see why we would waste an opportunity now by not introducing them.