Shingles Vaccination Programme: Motion
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-05
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Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel

We are sharing time. Senator Boyhan is not greedy. Ar an gcéad dul síos, gabhaim buíochas le Active Retirement Ireland, go háirithe Alison Bough, agus mé ag eagrú an rúin seo don Seanad. Gabhaim buíochas leis na Comhaltaí a chuir a gcomhshínithe síos chun tacú leis an rún atá faoinár mbráid inniu.
The full wording of the motion is substantial so I am presuming that all will be familiar with it or with the substance of it at least. For that reason I am going to move ahead with the actual debate points.
All the Senators present will be very knowledgeable about shingles, medically known as herpes zoster. Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. Anyone who has had chickenpox can develop shingles and that is estimated at roughly 60,000 people annually. So, it does present frequently and very frequently in people as they get older.
In itself, the infection symptoms can range from negligible to severe. In the latter cases it is described as a stabbing or burning sensation of continuous pain that can last for weeks or, indeed, months. However, it is in the aftermath that the real damage often presents in a well recognised condition, namely, post-herpetic neuralgia, PHN, which can last for a year or more and impacts the physical, psychological, functional and social dimensions of the affected person. Worrying also are recent studies which show raised protein levels in PHN sufferers' cerebral spinal fluids, which is frequently a pointer to increased risk of forms of dementia.
Before I go on I will briefly digress. I was working on this motion at home last week and the question struck me, and I struggled to find out, why is it called shingles? I was searching around and poking around. After a lot of this poking around I latterly found the answer in my late mother-in-law's copy of Harmsworth's Home Doctor and Encyclopedia of Good Health , published in 1924, which says that shingles comes from the Latin word cingulum , meaning a girdle or belt. I imagine this is testament to the frequency of the infection attacking right around the trunk, belt-like.
However, not at all by digression, I want to record my gratitude to Active Retirement Ireland and give special thanks to their team, headed by Alison Bough, who is here with her team in the Gallery. Active Retirement Ireland represents 850,000 of our people aged 65 years or over who very robustly signalled their support for our motion.
Because of two close encounters in my own families, I got the Shingrix vaccine last August and it cost me, as the bookies would say, a full monkey, that is, €500. If I resided in Tandragee, County Armagh, instead of Tramore, County Waterford, it would have cost me nothing. It is totally free in the North of Ireland, it is free all over the NHS, in much of the EU, the USA, Australia and Canada. Sadly in Ireland, the Republic that is, we are an uncomfortable outlier. As for our oldest citizens, those 850,000 of them, most of whom are reliable voters with 85 Dáil quotas between them, the message to them is that yes, of course, a good vaccine is available but it will cost them €500 out of their weekly pension of €278.
With its increased prevalence in our older aged cohort, shingles results in a significant rise in doctor consultations. As well as that, hospitalisations can and do occur often with herpes zoster ophthalmicus, which can leave the patient with deteriorated vision or, in extremis, blindness.
This leads us to the key question. Taking all that is known about how pernicious this complaint is, why not consider vaccinating freely against it? Twenty years ago, a vaccine called Zostavax was introduced but it had very limited success in protecting older people, that is, those most prone to serious infections. Now we have here in Ireland and in the free world, much of the western world, Shingrix, a vaccine that has about 90% efficacy, even in older people. The manufacturers of Shingrix, GlaxoSmithKline, GSK, that is much prevalent in the Irish economy, like all pharmaceutical companies are about people, yes of course, and about profit. However, they are cognisant of the small market Ireland represents in the greater scheme of things. More on that anon.
Vaccination is indisputably an ironclad investment in individuals, the health system, the economy and society in general. Every euro invested generates a significant return. In 2024, a report was commissioned by GSK Ireland from the Office of Health Economics. The report estimated that the full implementation of the current national immunisation advisory committee recommendations for older adult vaccination against influenza, pneumococcal disease, shingles and respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, would together generate a return of up to €23 in socioeconomic benefit for every €1 invested by the State. They would also prevent approximately 375,000 cases of disease, 74,000 hospitalisations and 1,400 deaths. Specifically for shingles, the return on investment was between 1.8 and fivefold for every euro invested.
In our neighbouring democracy, there is under way a great debate within and outside Parliament about assisted dying. Conversely, in this country and in many other democracies, a changing emphasis is becoming evident in health policies internationally that aims for good health for the duration of life. As never before, and concomitant with this, there are now over 200 vaccines in the development pipeline in Europe alone and 80% of those vaccines target illnesses affecting adults including cancer, neurological diseases and infections.
So, as our population increases and ages, we pressingly need to find ways to decrease the demands on our health system and signally, vaccination is a key tool. Such an initiative has four levers for Ireland, namely, bolstering the actual trust in vaccinations; ensuring equitable access, which is the main thrust today; leveraging data and technology, and positioning Ireland for future innovation in our pharma industries. Of these, I would rate equitable access as the most important. By definition, a vaccine cannot work unless it is accessed.
If it is a very expensive vaccine to access, that access will be confined to the wealthiest cohorts, which surely, for all us people who live in a republic, is the very antithesis of what constitutes our Republic in Article 41, which guarantees the equality of all citizens before the law.
I will go back and reiterate where a shingles national immunisation programme is already funded. It is funded now in 15 national programmes across Europe: Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Israel, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovenia, Cyprus and Croatia. It is 65% funded in France, and we expect other countries to come on board in 2026, Finland being one of them. A shingles programme is widely funded in the US, totally in Australia, and in some provinces of Canada for older citizens. As can be seen from all of the above, the vaccine is available in both older and newer European countries and older and newer democracies. It is not just a vaccine for wealthy countries.
A few years ago, the Minister for Health at the time asked HIQA to perform a health technology assessment on the shingles vaccination. It concluded, with advice to the Minister, that vaccination at the current price would not be a good use of resources. Since the health technology assessment was published, the vaccine developer has engaged - this is very important - in good faith with the National Immunisation Office to deliver a programme which represents true value for this State. That engagement concluded with the company submitting a best and final offer through the Department of Health which was at least as good as that offered to the larger European markets. Currently, this offer has not been accepted but we are very hopeful. Ireland, as we stand, is now an outlier when compared with our neighbours in the UK and Europe. One could reasonably ask how other European countries that have assessed the vaccine have decided that it represents a good use of resources and Ireland has not. Are they looking in truth and comprehensively at the value in a wider context, including the growing cost of caregivers' time, time off work, hospitalisations, of which there are many, the propensity down the road for dementia and so on?
I am asserting in the strongest way I can in this House that Ireland should not remain an outlier in Europe when it comes to the protection of its older and immunocompromised citizens from the increased risk of shingles infection and its serious associated health complications. There is a real inequality issue on our island between those who can afford to buy the vaccine privately and those who cannot and between those living in the Six Counties and those in the Twenty-six Counties.
My uncle contracted shingles when he was in his early 70s. This is just a case in point. It heralded a catalogue of health reversals. He was a charming old guy, an inoffensive bachelor uncle, but after shingles he suffered two strokes, multiple falls involving fractures, and serious loss of speech and communication until, finally, his body was invaded with hideous melanoma, which at length saw his demise. He is just one of the hundreds annually, and it need not be like this.
The stealthy, insidious onslaught of shingles was summed up to me recently by one person infected:
I was fit and healthy...I never saw it as ... [something that would happen] to me. The pain was the worst ever, 24/7 and nothing eased it. It was six weeks before it got bearable, but two years on, it still comes back. At this stage, I doubt if I'll ever get rid of it completely.
Molaim an rún seo. I commend this motion to our House.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-05/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:35+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-05