Health (Provision of Contraception Prescribing Service in Retail Pharmacy Businesses) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-07-15 ============================================================ Pádraig Rice (SD), Cork South-Central It is important that we allow pharmacists to operate at the top of their licence and give them as much power as possible, and alleviate pressures on GPs. As I said, this is recommended by the World Health Organization and endorsed by the previous health committee and the IPU. That is the background to this amendment. Many pharmacists have private spaces where they do consultations about emergency contraception. Those spaces exist. It is one that we can maybe think about and have dialogue and engagement about in future. We can think about how we make the most of pharmacists and take pressure off GPs, while doing so with the best health outcomes. --- 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/2026-07-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:08+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-15