I remember driving one afternoon a few years ago, listening to Joe Duffy’s Liveline on RTÉ Radio 1. The programme stopped me in my tracks.
Woman after woman described years of pain and how endometriosis had changed her life. Some spoke about the stark choices presented to them as ways of managing the pain, others about being unable to have children and what that loss had meant.
As heartbreaking as the individual accounts were, every one had the same thread; the women had sought medical help and had been dismissed. They were told their pain was part of having periods, something they should learn to manage. Some felt they were feeble for complaining; others began to wonder whether they were imagining it.
The discussion took place in October 2022 and continued for a week. Different women came on air each day, yet the stories were painfully familiar: years spent adjusting life around symptoms, followed by more years trying to persuade someone that something was wrong.
One woman wrote that women with endometriosis had been “neglected, gaslit and not believed”. She had travelled to Britain for treatment and found a doctor who validated her pain. Her message was simple: “My pain is not in my head.”
I thought of those stories again this week when Donegal TD Pearse Doherty asked women on social media to share their experiences of endometriosis. Some described waits of ten years, others, 16 or 17.
Nearly four years after that week of Liveline, women are still describing the same struggle to be treated fairly.
Endometriosis is a chronic disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows outside it. It can cause severe pelvic pain and heavy bleeding, while fertility may also be affected. The HSE estimates it affects one in seven women and girls in Ireland. Asthma, by comparison, affects about one in ten people and has an established national model of care.
Much of the impact of endometriosis remains invisible. A woman may appear well while pain determines whether she can work or travel. Over time, life becomes organised around a condition that may still not have been recognised.
The average wait for a diagnosis in Ireland is repeatedly put at nine years. For a girl whose symptoms begin early, that can carry her from secondary school well into adulthood.
The harm caused during those years goes beyond the delay in diagnosis. It includes appointments where symptoms may have been minimised and the loss of confidence that comes when a woman’s account of her own body is repeatedly questioned.
There’s a particular cruelty in making someone feel weak because she cannot tolerate pain that should never have been accepted as ordinary.
In October 2025, Ireland published its first National Framework for the Management of Endometriosis, setting out a pathway for care and plans to strengthen specialist services.
It’s still only months old, so its overall effect cannot yet be known, but questions remain about whether the services needed to support it are being built quickly enough.
As recruitment continues, the State also lacks a clear picture of waiting times because many patients are recorded under general gynaecology. Meanwhile, two new non-invasive tests, including one based on a saliva sample, have been recommended for early NHS use in England and Wales to help identify endometriosis sooner, raising an obvious question about when similar advances will form part of Ireland’s pathway.
Among those responding to Pearse Doherty were women asking that adenomyosis and polycystic ovary syndrome receive similar attention.
They are distinct conditions and require their own forms of care, but the concern behind those comments is familiar: women describing serious symptoms that have been minimised or left without a clear route to diagnosis.
That should trouble us in a country where CervicalCheck and repeated failures in gynecological care have already shown the cost of disregarding women when they speak about their own bodies.
Women with endometriosis had to campaign for years before a national framework was put in place. Those with adenomyosis and PCOS are now asking whether they will have to do the same.
The framework is welcome, but it cannot by itself change the culture that allowed severe pain to be normalised and women’s accounts to be doubted. That change will be evident when a woman seeking help is believed from the beginning and referred for proper investigation without having to spend years making the same case.
The Fresh Take column is written by Sabrina Sweeney and features every Thursday in the Donegal News.