Cancer Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-04
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I thank the Minister for that response. First of all, the inconsistency between the experience people have in different parts of the country has to be addressed as a matter of urgency. Indeed, I was conscious when I was getting my own treatment that people were coming from different parts of the country. There was a place available for them in St. Luke's to stay, but it was not provided by the State. To the best of my knowledge, it was funded by the Irish Cancer Society. The Minister can correct me if I am wrong on that. Services such as where people could stay should not simply be dependent on charitable organisations raising funds. My understanding was that the place that people could stay overnight was not run by the hospital even though it is fantastic that it was there for them, but that is an aside.
On the linear accelerators in the national replacement programme, the Minister has given me some answers. I got some answers from the HSE on the replacement programme. It is worth saying, while it is under way, that all in the St. Luke's Radiation Oncology Network, SLRON, are supposed to be replaced after ten years. Two of those will only be replaced when they are 19 years old, two will be replaced when they are 21 years old, two will be replaced when they are 14 years old, two when they are 18 years old, and two when they are 17 years old. All will be well over the ten years it is supposed to be. That shows a lack of planning to have a replacement programme that is organised centrally and that is ahead of the game rather than reacting afterwards and realising we have not replaced the machines and therefore the machines are breaking down, causing hardship for the staff providing the treatment and for those who are awaiting the treatment, often impacting on things such as childcare and their ability to travel back to where they live in other parts of the country.
On equality of access, I will read the following from a report that was sent to me by a radiation oncology medical physicist. He was talking about PET CT scanners. He said that only two of the Republic of Ireland's eight current PET CT scanners are fully or partly publicly funded and that there is a system where 75% of net national PET CT imaging capacity resides in private institutions. He has done a report on that. I do not know the detail of that, but that shows a worrying lack of those scanners in the public system, funded publicly rather than being only available in the private sector.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:35+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-04