I hope that over the coming months, or at the least before the summer recess, this House can have statements on early onset Parkinson's disease. It often gets very caught up in the conversation on later age Parkinson's, but it is very different in its presentation, the interventions that are required, the impact it has on starting a family and on the person's work life. A person's life can become very impoverished quickly because they cannot work or gain work.

I happen to somehow have a few people in my life who have been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's, including one person as young as 31. It has such a massive impact, and this House needs to have a stand-alone conversation in order that Members can give it the attention it deserves and we can begin to invest in supporting people with early onset Parkinson's.

I was at a briefing on early onset Parkinson's a few weeks back. There was a female doctor there from Dublin Brain Bank which is something that is quite close to my heart. In 2012, I sat with my dad and asked him if he would be interested in donating his brain to the brain bank. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's. We thought that it was misdiagnosis, and we fought it. Donating his brain to the brain bank not only gave us confirmation that we were right that there was a misdiagnosis - he actually had progressive supranuclear palsy, PSP, which is locked-in syndrome - and his treatment would have very different, it also allowed my dad's brain to be used for research. Members might not believe it, but I am quite sentimental, and when I was in that briefing a few weeks ago and they said that there were only 400 brains in the brain bank, I was extremely proud that my dad's brain was one of those brains. It also got me thinking about the infrastructure and why there are only 400 brains, especially when the research is so important.

I also learned that the tissue that is kept for that research is held in the brain bank for many years, so it made me feel somewhat comforted that somewhere in the country there is a bit of my dad's brain tissue still kicking on, which is nice, but we should also have a conversation about the infrastructure around the brain bank, how important it is for research and what it needs to be able to have much more of a campaign on the importance of donating one's brain.