I thank Deputy Cullinane and Sinn Féin for bringing forward this very important motion on cancer services, which I am very happy to support. It is more or less a year since I started my cancer treatment for throat cancer. The most important thing I wish to say is how grateful I am to all of those who work in cancer services, from the doctors and nurses to the radiotherapists and nutritionists, from the orderlies and porters to the receptionists and the people who research in the area of cancer and help to develop the treatments - all these huge numbers of people. There are a lot more that I am probably not mentioning. Without them, I might not be standing here, or I might be facing a bleak future, but instead the treatment was successful. It was thanks to those amazing people and all the work they did. I am very grateful. Given that 50% of the population will have a scrape with cancer, it is important to know that it is not a death sentence as maybe going back not so long ago it was seen as such. The treatment is advancing all the time if, ideally, we catch it early or it gets treated. If we invest and resource the people who work in this area properly, support them, the research necessary, the equipment necessary and the capacity and resources, then we can save a lot of lives. I am certainly a major beneficiary of that. I am not quite sure why the Government has put down an amendment to Sinn Féin's motion because it could certainly add things to it. Sinn Féin's motion is very reasonable in saying that, of course, there should not be a postcode lottery. I have had a very good experience. It varies around the country. In more rural parts of the country, in particular, it can be very different. I would not like having to travel. I was lucky in that regard. I went to St. Luke's. I am well paid, so it does not matter so much, but in St. Luke's patients do not have to pay for parking. In St. Vincent's, there is a parking charge, and it is quite a lot. It is crazy to put financial obstacles in the way of people when they are in this sort of situation. There are other financial obstacles to accessing services, such as if a person does not have a medical card they still have to pay. The amount of money that they have to pay is significant for some people. We should not place financial obstacles in the way of people when they are in this sort of situation. I agree with the motion. We need a cancer strategy for the next ten years. We need to resource that on a multi-annual basis, so there is certainty. We need to have equipment replacement programmes. It has already been referred to. The age of the linear accelerators is ridiculous. The vast majority of them are way past their sell-by date. That makes a big difference. One of the things a patient is affected by when getting treatment is the collateral damage of the treatment in terms of the side effects, but the newer the machinery and the more precise the treatment is, the better it is for dealing with the cancer and it lessens the impact of the side effects. This makes a real difference to the quality of life of people who get the treatment and to the precision of the treatment. We need to have that properly organised national equipment replacement scheme rather than it being done on an ad hoc basis. Senior radiation therapists should be on a senior pay scale. A lot of the people who are qualified in this area are leaving the country because they do not have comparable pay rates to people in other parts of the country. We also have a problem that out of the eight PET scanners in this country, only one is fully publicly funded and one is partially funded. They are in private hands. The only place that the stuff that goes into PET CT scanners is made is Blackrock Clinic, a private clinic, which is ridiculous. There should not be that level of privatisation of the means to produce PET scanners and the equipment because it raises questions about equality of treatment when dealing with cancer. There are many more things that I could say but I am out of time. Hopefully, the Government is listening.

Sentiment score: 0.05