Women's Health
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-15
============================================================

Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Butler. On the €180 million, the annual health budget last year was €27 billion. I am aware that women's health supports are covered in the annual health budget. In that context, the €180 million since 2020 for women's health feels shockingly small. I have tabled a parliamentary question on this and the Department's response will share the breakdown of where the €180 million goes. It is a question around the commitment to multi-annual funding for research and how we are using that funding. I appreciate that the Minister of State will not have the answers because the Department is getting the breakdown of the €180 million for me at the moment. If the free contraception scheme, the new State-funded IVF for women with endometriosis and the free hormone replacement therapy are covered under that, it seems even smaller in many ways. It is shockingly small compared with the overall health budget.
I appreciate that the Minister of State cannot answer this on the fly because the Department has not got the data yet, but it is something to consider when we examine the overall health budget versus the women's health budget. The latter feels very small, worryingly small, including when we take into account the decades of underinvestment.

---

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/2026-07-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:16+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-15