Amendment No. 4 argues the case for a programme of education and information which, I have no doubt, costs money. There is an anomaly here in that amendment No. 2 has been ruled out of order. I appreciate the Chair's interpretation of it. Amendment No. 2 relates to a key factor which is missing from the Bill and we cannot disregard it. If we disregard the principle of free availability to medical card holders, we are really knocking the whole system out of kilter and being blind to the reality of how life is lived. It would be important to pay tribute to politicians, and women in particular, who raised the issue of contraception at a time when it was neither profitable nor politically popular to do so. I am thinking of the women who were vilified for going on the "condom train".
I welcome the liberal rush in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil now. It has taken a very short time, when one considers the shift that has occurred in public opinion and among politicians, and that there were many people who were pioneers who took a lot of hard knocks to stand by their principles. One of those principles was that condoms and contraception should be available to all women, not just women who could afford to avail of contraception.
There are complex attitudes. I am glad to hear people who oppose this Bill and feel strongly about it. Even the little story that Deputy Flanagan told about the condom vending machine in, I think, Galway, is an indication that people may, in principle, agree with the availability of condoms but may still feel self-conscious about them or lacking in confidence.
The principal point I would make is that we are overlooking the cost factor. Unlike the Minister, I am middle aged enough not to be certain about the price of a packet of condoms. I think it is around £5 a packet. Cost comes into everything. One cannot avoid dealing with the question of cost and to simply rub out this amendment is not facing the reality. One of the advertisements that I felt was effective was the one that depicted the mother of the AIDS victim, and she was speaking to mothers. Mothers often get loaded with the baggage and the responsibility, and that is fair enough, but what happens if one is a mother on a low income and trying to hold a household together in a family where nobody is working and nobody will ever work? What happens to that mother when she is faced with the responsibility of trying to ensure that her children are safe from HIV infection? Let us say one of her children is taking drugs. Let us say another is sexually active, not abnormally so, but a young person who is sexually active. That mother may well have to make the decision between spending her limited cash on a pair of shoes for the child going to school or on a packet of condoms for the teenager. We all know the reality of what would happen in that contest.
The Minister and the party he represents have a responsibility to consider the reality of family life, the reality of the one-third of the population who are living in poverty and the high numbers that are young people and children. If they are people who need to be protected from AIDS and HIV infection, it is up to us to enable them to have that protection and ensuring that it is solely in the marketplace that condoms are going to be available is simply not on. I ask the Minister, regardless of the amendment going out the window, to take that point on board.
Also in the context of costs, let me go back to television advertising. How effective is it? It is a very costly business and I wonder if this is the best use of limited resources. I know, for my own part, the most effective notice I ever saw relating to AIDS was in a public lavatory where somebody had put up a small notice advising on the precautions that one needs to take. I do not know how it came to be there, but it was very effective; it was very discreet and was simply advising people of the dangers. I wonder about the whole question of television advertising, but I will leave that.
There are also problems in targeting. In targeting particular sections in the community, having condoms freely available enables the services to target at risk behaviour and we have to have flexibility for medical card holders in the context of free availability. We also have to consider the geographic inequities that occur at the moment. I was involved in a family planning service for years in County Wicklow and most of the business done was mail order not locally but from other parts of the country where people could not get contraceptives. If it were the case that medical card holders could as of right avail of condoms if they needed to, it would tilt the balance and make this legislation much more acceptable.
I have made the point already in relation to information and education so I do not have to repeat myself on that score. However, I would ask that the core point be taken on board by the Minister, that unless it becomes a true prophylactic, unless it becomes part of medical treatment, health promotion, ill-health prevention and is included in the medical card system, we will be only servicing those people who can afford to be serviced and that is wrong and is ensuring that rather than winning the battle against AIDS we are hampering ourselves before we start.
