I thank my colleague David Cullinane for bringing forward this motion. As the last speaker, Pa Daly, said, medical cards for cancer patients are a real issue, as is the affordability of access to care. I ask the Minister of State to bring that back to the Minister to ensure that something is done about it. I commend all the staff working in oncology. They work really hard. In Mayo cancer patients are served by Galway and Mayo university hospitals. The biggest problem we have in Mayo is the delays in diagnosis. If you can afford to get the scans and everything else, you get the treatment more quickly. What kind of a country are we when your life depends on how much money you have? That absolutely should not be the case. Then you have the diagnosis and people undergo treatment and there is no bed there. When I say there is no bed, obviously I mean there is no bed that is fully staffed there for the clinicians who are there to give the treatment. What a waste of money. They stand there waiting for the patients but there are no beds to put them in in order that they can treat them and that they can recover. That absolutely has to be addressed. This is not a problem from today or yesterday; it has been a problem particularly since we have had the centres of excellence. The centres of excellence are a good idea but not if you cannot access them. This has to be made accessible for people. We cannot continue to operate on a postcode lottery whereby if you live in Mayo, you have less of a chance of surviving cancer than you would anywhere else. We have to stop that. We have to bring equity into the system. I think the way we can do that is by having an all-island approach. Wonderful work is done with the all-island cancer research group. We should use that model to spread that across the island in order that there is joined-up treatment of cancer care here. In the motion we refer to car parking charges. Trying to get a car parking space outside Galway University Hospital is absolutely horrendous. I remember the day my mother died and driving around the hospital looking for a car park space.

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