I know that we will have a debate today on Europe Day, which is very welcome. Europe got a great boost over the last 18 months with the Moldovan election and the latest Hungarian election. It gave a great spring in the step to the European project. I encourage Members to go down to the coffee dock after the Order of Business because the Oireachtas work learning, OWL, programme has put together a very good European Day with a competition and so on. It would be nice if it was supported because they put a huge amount of work into it.

I request a debate here on a national strategy for low vision and low hearing. These are two critical senses. While a lot of lip service is delivered on the importance of these senses and of regular hearing and sight checks to eliminate preventable hearing loss and sight loss, we have not adopted a national strategy on either. These two strategies are critical because we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people who are affected with hearing loss and sight loss. While good work is being done in the HSE in both disciplines, there is no formalised adopted national strategy with targets and review mechanisms built in. We have seen how successful national strategies have been, particularly in the area of cancer and elsewhere. We critically need them in these two areas. Four out of five people who lose their sight in this country do so unnecessarily because they do not get the interventions at a critical time, including proper eye tests at critical junctures in their lives, and when they go to address the issue, it is too late or the deterioration has already started. The same applies with hearing loss. The Acting Leader might, at her convenience, request those two issues to be dealt with as one by the Minister for Health.