Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The pharmacists will not decide. They will have a clear list and they will have training in all of these things. It will expand over time. Because we have never done anything like this, we will start with a fairly narrow list but I am pretty sure it will broaden.

I am very open to naloxone being over the counter. I am very open to as wide a distribution as possible. In other countries, it is successfully used much more broadly than it is here. Canada is a very good example. Unfortunately, the reason they have so much of it is because they are seeing so many opioid overdoses. They are dealing with a horrific situation in Canada. Many people are regularly carrying these pens now because so many people are overdosing. In fact, their equivalent of our Secretary General in the Department of Health told me that during Covid, in Vancouver, they lost more people to overdoses than they did to Covid. It is the opioid wave. It came up through the United States. It is something we must be very aware of here.

I am more than happy to look at the use of separate entrances for methadone. I have spoken to clinicians in some of the new primary care centres and, indeed, I have spoken to some of the patients.What they have said to me, but maybe they are only giving me one side of it, is that for some of them, they prefer the anonymity. Some of them do not necessarily want it widely advertised that they are on methadone. They prefer-----