I bring colleagues' attention, prior to the budget madness of next week, to a briefing I am hosting in the audiovisual room next Wednesday at 11 a.m. about stem cell transplants and the lack of stem cell transplant facilities in Ireland. Currently, you can only receive stem cell transplants in Galway or St. James's Hospital in Dublin. There are 2,400 people diagnosed in Ireland every year with a blood-related cancer, but the lack of stem cell therapy means that a lot of people are excluded from accessing this treatment. What we are advocating for is that a stem cell transplant lab be granted in Cork University Hospital. This would come at a cost of €27 million, as the national cancer control programme, NCCP, has already provided a full-time nurse and a half-time consultant in Cork University Hospital. Now, we need the lab. It was a service that was provided up until 2006, at which point it ceased. Since 2010, there have been two attempts to reinstate it in the hospital. This has not happened. It is currently on a group project list but we are asking that it be taken on its own and given priority. I appreciate that this may sound very Cork-based, but this would not just benefit patients in Cork. It would benefit patients anywhere in the south east and south west as well as patients in the east and the north west, because the reduction of patients having to come from a referral from Cork University Hospital to Galway or Dublin would decrease the demands on those services. That briefing is on next week at 11 a.m. We are very lucky to be joined by Professor Ibrahim Yakoub-Agha who is president of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, as well as many other experts, including Dr. Bruce Levine who founded the CAR T-cell transplant treatment.

I wish to particularly commend Mags McCarthy, a patient advocate who lives near me at home in Cork North-West and is from Dripsey. She has done so much awareness raising on this issue and it was she who came to me a few months ago to try to put this together. She has been working with a lot of TDs and Senators across parties. This is a cross-party thing. I would like to get as much support as possible, so I urge Senators to support that next week.

If the Leas-Chathaoirleach will indulge me slightly, I wish to commend the National Ambulance Service and the air ambulance service.

We are very lucky where I am to have an air ambulance in Rathcoole. Somebody very dear to me suffered a cardiac arrest yesterday in a small village in Cork. Thankfully an ambulance as well as an air ambulance reached him within seven minutes. We are very lucky and he is doing incredibly well. A lot of the time we speak about issues where a service is not good enough or a service is inadequately funded. When we have personal experience of these things, it is important to commend that service. I give my deepest thanks to the air ambulance and the national ambulance services. I want to highlight a good news story because too often we come here with critical stories. I thank them very much and commend them on the work they do.