Shingles Vaccination Programme: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-05 ============================================================ Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin I welcome the Minister of State and thank her for being here. I commend Senator Joe Conway on bringing forward the motion. We have heard all the evidence to support both the sense of and the absolute ethical imperative for doing this. I just want to add to the lived experience component of the debate. My father, who passed away a long time ago, was a garda in Dublin. Unusually for a garda in Dublin, he was from Dublin. He was a very tall man. Before he joined the Garda, he was a carpenter. That was something he kept up, I think slightly controversially, for the entirety of his career in An Garda Síochána. For me, as his family, he was a big, kind of indestructible and larger-than-life individual, but he got shingles. I saw both my mum and my dad grow older, suffer various health crises and become more debilitated and infirm. Eventually they passed away. The word I would use to describe the impact shingles had on my father is "frightening". Senator Craughwell described that agonising, excruciating pain. It was really shocking for us to see him so stricken by it. He ended up, unfortunately and tragically, with permanent damage to one of his eyes. That meant that he could not use his tools, and for him, that was such a blow to his quality of life and enjoyment of life and how he felt about himself, as a retired person, being a useful member of society. I used to go down to his workshop and see all of his tools sitting there, and he was up in the house. I remember the words he used. He said, "I am fed up". That was because of shingles. There is an issue around how we see and value older people in our society. If this was a condition that impacted, let us say, infants or small children, there would be no question of it becoming a compulsory free vaccine for all families around the country. We would not tolerate even the prospect of such suffering among one in three junior or senior infants or babies. There is a little blurring of the absolute requirement in respect of this matter because it relates to older people. In the minds of some, it is probably assumed that people experience suffering as part and parcel of ageing. As our parents used to say, offer it up for the holy souls. We are beyond that now. I will conclude with a few observations. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Health. Last year, representatives from the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, NCPE, appeared before the committee. I got the opportunity to interrogate them about the point Senator Craughwell made about how the NCPE calculates its cost-benefit analysis regarding the viability of drugs and treatments. It became very clear from that discussion that it only uses quantitative analysis, statistical analysis and mathematical computations, which are very deterministic and mechanical. It does not take into account either the ethical or social impact of certain illnesses and diseases. The impression we formed at the committee was that the system which the NCPE used to make its calculations is not fit for purpose. If we look at health economic units in other jurisdictions, we can see that they factor in the sociological elements and, in particular, the ethical components relating to decisions. It is simply not good enough to say that because something costs a particular amount, we are not going to alleviate someone's suffering. That goes against everything that makes us human. I query the deterministic nature of the process used and note that the centre does not carry out a qualitative analysis or look at the phenomenological outcomes of particular conditions. I will declare a conflict of interest shortly. We tend to move very slowly on things. Can we progress this matter with some urgency? My conflict of interest is that I will turn 60 in August, so I would like to get that free vaccine. I would rather spend €500 on something else. I just wanted to be totally upfront with people. I commend the motion to the House. --- 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/seanad/2026-02-05/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:35+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-05