The terrible thing about this subject is that it comes down so much to economics and it should not. It should come down to individuals and everything that we can do for them. I want to echo what many speakers have said in this debate about how we need to accelerate the progress in relation to the provision of treatments for rare diseases. The fact that they are rare diseases should not mean that people do not have access to the treatments they need. I have listened to some of the comments on how we need to have a pharma industry that works for the people. While that is laudable and entirely appropriate, we also have to be mindful that the money spent on research and development comes from private investors, and much of it essentially comes to nothing. The hope is that researchers strike upon some drug or treatment that actually solves a problem and, therefore, is marketable, saleable and profitable. If we had a situation where we were spending public money on research and development for pharma companies, the public would rightly be outraged by the amount of money that was spent on programmes that simply came to nothing in the end. Let us not be naive about this. We need private investment and we need the pharma companies, which are expert at this whereas the State is not, to innovate in this space and develop the very treatments that we are relying on them to create, patent and market to solve problems. There is, however, a legitimate criticism to be made of certain pharma companies. We have individual markets on drugs throughout the European Union and I understand why that is. Since Ireland is a small market, it is not going to be as profitable for a large multinational pharmaceutical company to make the application to have the drugs included in the payment scheme and all the rest of it in this jurisdiction, because there are fewer people here who are going to consume the drug than in somewhere like France, Germany or Italy. That is a particular shame and it reflects very poorly on the pharmaceutical companies that they do not do this. Duchenne muscular dystrophy has been mentioned today. It is a case where the application has been made. I raised the issue this morning with the Minister for Health. My understanding was that she was waiting for the application to be made. It has now been made and we hope it will be accelerated. It is a case where time is very much against people who are suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy and we need to provide that treatment as soon as possible. Another example is eosinophilic esophagitis, EoE, which is a chronic, allergic inflammatory disease of the esophagus from which people suffer and that can be treated by a particular drug produced by Sanofi. Some 50% of its global production is in Waterford, yet that drug is not available for treatment of juveniles in this jurisdiction. My understanding of the reason it is not available is quite simply that Sanofi has not made the application. There might be really good reasons for that and if there are, then let us have them out, but my concern is that because Ireland is a smaller market for these drugs, it disincentivises the company from making what is presumably a costlier application from the point of view putting together material than it might be in another country. For dealing with rare diseases in the longer term, perhaps we should be looking at a single European Union market for these things, which would be a single EU authorisation or application market so that we no longer suffered from being the smaller market within the European Union. We could tell drug companies to apply to the European Union and then they would get to run their drugs in Ireland and get to avail of the schemes in Ireland. In that way, we would solve this problem.

Sentiment score: -0.06