Cancer Services Dail Éireann — 2026-02-04 ============================================================ Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire I am here for the public system. I am here to invest in the public system and to champion the public system. A total of 80% of our cancer care gets delivered through the public system and that is my focus. The Deputy is correct to highlight the replacement programme in St. Luke's. I have updated the Deputy that there is a replacement equipment supply commencing in quarter 1, with a contractor in place this year. In quarter 4, we are also working on a detailed business case for the Beaumont phase 2 expansion. There is also work to be done in Cork and Galway. There is a particular difference with St. Luke's, but the work is progressing. The Deputy is quite right that it should have progressed before now. I highlight as well some of the other important developments that are happening more broadly. It is about machinery, treatment and additional staff. It is also about prevention programmes and screening programmes. We have recently announced the extension of the Laura Brennan HPV catch-up vaccination programme targeted at fifth and sixth years in schools. We would encourage anyone whose child, male or female, has not had that vaccination to get it where it is offered. We know it is most effective when a child is about 12 or 13, before they become in any way sexually active. Please take that vaccination if you can. It is there to try to eliminate cervical cancer. I am examining, with the screening control programme and NSAC, the opportunities to most effectively extend screening for bowel cancer in a way that is going to get the best for us. I am very conscious of the “do not attend” rate and the rate of participation for that. It is one of the reasons we have prioritised that for the pharmacy extension, and in the agreement that we have reached with pharmacists, who are now going to try to proactively register some of their patients on the bowel cancer screening programme in an effort to get more people onto that screening programme. Encouragingly, I met Professor Daniel Ryan from Beaumont this week regarding different options for lung screening and what opportunities may be there. We are not doing enough on lung cancer screening, particularly for those people who are not symptomatic or are very young. We are now able to pick that up much better than has been the case heretofore. The Deputy and I could speak about all of the different elements of cancer care, from vaccinations to screening to identification. We have to recognise the exceptional work that is being done at the research level in targeting and manipulating cancer cells in completely different ways, so people are living longer. This year is an exciting year to try to really drive forward with ambition with what we are going to do for the next ten years. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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