An tOrd Gnó - Order of Business
Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-29
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Alison Comyn (FF), Nominated by the Taoiseach

I mention a moment of enormous pride for Drogheda, my home town. Five young people from the town have been recognised for the 2026 global undergraduate awards. Katelyn Sherry and Robert Finan of Trinity College Dublin are both from Drogheda and have been named global winners in, respectively, politics and international relations, and philosophy.
Kristaps Meiers is a regional winner in visual arts while Caolum Dyas and Czacarri Muli were highly commended in engineering and visual arts. Global winners represent the highest ranking submission in their category worldwide so five students from one town receiving this level of international recognition really does put Drogheda on the cerebral map. They have done their families, their colleagues and our town enormously proud.
I seek an update from the Minister for Health on access to the shingles vaccination. My colleague Senator Robbie Gallagher raised this issue earlier this year. In May, we heard that the HSE was negotiating with the vaccine provider and that the Department was examining its introduction, initially for immunocompromised people. We are now at the end of September. I know of three women who are currently suffering terribly with shingles. We are talking about all age brackets here. An older friend of mine in Drogheda told me that she recently paid well over €300 for vaccinations. She is a senior citizen so that includes the assistance that is available to her. At the moment, the full vaccination costs €500 to €600. It is not a luxury. Shingles can cause debilitating and long-lasting pain. I ask the Leader to seek a debate or an update from the Minister on these negotiations and on plans to make vaccination more affordable and accessible.
I will return to an issue I have raised very recently, the proliferation of vape shops right across the country. We have a great many of them in my hometown of Drogheda and across Louth. We should examine whether local authorities need stronger planning tools to protect the diversity of our town centres. We already have precedent for public health considerations in planning, including restrictions on fast food outlets being placed close to schools. Could we examine similar measures for vape shops, including restrictions on their concentration and proximity to one another? More broadly, could councils be able to consider the excessive clustering of identical retail uses? This might include the likes of mobile phone shops, nail bars and barber shops. We are seeing far too many of these, particularly in some very small towns and villages. As I said last week, our town centres need variety. They need to attract a multitude of different types of retail. They need independent businesses, services and reasons for people to visit and to stay. I ask for a debate on our planning system, how we can achieve this and how we can help local authorities to achieve greater variety, thereby cutting down on the proliferation on the likes of vape shops.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-09-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:00:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-29