Irish Government to Fund IVF

15.01.2019

The Irish government has said that it will provide funding for IVF and other assisted reproduction procedures. The announcement, by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, came as he admitted that planned legislation on assisted reproduction would take longer than planned. The Assisted Reproduction Bill, previously debated in 2018 is now unlikely to be passed in 2019 as the government has other priorities. However, Varadkar said that this should not delay the funding being made available. “You don’t necessarily need the legislation to be passed because the treatment is available in Ireland, it is not illegal, so it will be funded,” he said.

IVF is available in Ireland, but the costly procedure is not directly publicly funded (although the cost is subject to tax relief). Customers of the private IVF clinics presently can expect to pay thousands of euros. The planned financial assistance will be means-tested and recipients will be expected to contribute to the cost. There will also be certain as-yet unspecified criteria to be met in order to qualify for funding.

“Couples who need IVF or [assisted reproduction] do face very high costs. We would like to assist them in some way and we set aside some money to do that,” Varadkar said. “Obviously, you are going to prioritise somebody who has no children over somebody who already has children,” the Taoiseach explained, “and you are going to prioritise maybe younger women who for medical reasons can’t conceive as opposed to somebody who is in their 50s and 60s who wants to have a child, so there will have to be criteria and there will still be an out of pocket contribution, but we have set aside some funding next year to get that started.”

BioNews. January 7.