Women's Health
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-07
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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I am so grateful to the Senator and to everybody who has raised awareness of endometriosis. I thank Senator McCormack as well for highlighting Kathleen King and Cate O’Connor.
We are now better and more profoundly aware of the impact of endometriosis on women’s lives and we really are trying to expand the specialist services. I might come back to the Senator with information on Greece, because it is the subject of particular work at the moment. I hope, though, that the Senator can see the authenticity and sincerity with which we are trying to approach this work.
As part of my St. Patrick’s Day visit to Germany, I made a special effort concerning endometriosis, along with my counterpart, the German health minister, who is the minister for health for 80 million people, an enormous position. I was there to meet her as part of the St. Patrick’s Day programme. Instead of our meeting happening in a government office, she and I went to an endometriosis clinic in the Charité hospital in Berlin, which is a specialist service. We had our bilateral meeting there, with our two flags on the table. We had our meeting in a women’s health clinic, in an endometriosis clinic, at the Virchow clinic, which is a part of Berlin's Charité hospital.
Then we had a meeting with the wonderful Professor Sylvia Mechsner, together with advocates and patients. Professor Mechsner, who I hope is coming in December, has developed an endometriosis treatment pathway that is a real multimodal approach. Despite this technical capacity the Germans are, like us, struggling with costs and capacity. We are not on our own in terms of the needs to improve services. The Minister, Ms Warken, and I were determined to try to use our platforms as women ministers for health in Europe and the platform of St. Patrick's Day to amplify the experience of endometriosis not just in Ireland and Germany but on a pan-European basis. I have of course invited the Minister, Ms Warken, to the endometriosis ministerial conference in December.
I do not have time to speak further but this is a body of work the Oireachtas has leaned into in a huge way, as advocates have done many times. I really want to acknowledge and apologise again that before now, the services were not the way they should have been and the reaction was not always what it should have been. Many women were cared for and cared for enough but there are so many who were not. I really acknowledge that in everything we do. I hope the Senator can see every effort is being made to try to genuinely turn the tide on that and turn it forever.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-07