Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That advice, as far as I can see, was partly because of this issue of recurrence. All I can say is that I wanted to do it. Every Member of the Cabinet and the Oireachtas wanted to do it. If it could have been done, we would have done it. There were numerous conversations at the Cabinet about this. Every time we brought it back, my Cabinet colleagues and I asked whether we could go further and do more. We pushed and pushed for this. It has never been out of a lack of willingness or due to not listening. We have listened and we have got most of the requests over the line. Some of them are just not possible because you hit up against the Constitution. On the issue of recurrence, for example, if we did it and changed the Act, a few things would happen. First of all, the laboratories would walk. Under the Constitution, we cannot compel them to be involved in the tribunal. Therefore, they would walk and go straight to the High Court. The tribunal would shut down. Even if the laboratories did not walk, which they would do, the initial awards would be lower because in the High Court, as in the tribunal, awards are given for the future possibility of recurrence. It is already brought into the first award. What would happen is that the first award would be reduced. The legal advice I got was that if there was recurrence three or five years later, constitutionally, the laboratories would be allowed to ask that it be proven that it is a recurrence and that it is linked to what happened several years earlier. Women could be potentially asked to go through a process again. All I can say is that everything that was possible to do was done. I am acutely aware of this. There is nothing I would have liked more than to have got everything over the line. We are all on the same team on this. That is as far as it was able to go.

In terms of the tribunal versus the High Court, it is up to every woman and family to do what they think is right. It is up to me to lay out the case for the tribunal. During the debate, I made a few notes on the advantages of the tribunal that we have tried to create over the High Court. One is that it is much quicker. It is months versus years, and, as colleagues have said, time matters. Months versus years is really important. The hearings are in private. The whole thing has been set up differently from the courts to address the process women have had to go through. The hearings are in private. There are pre-hearing steps that reduce the adversarial nature of it. There are, for example, written statements rather than verbal testimony. The hearings are less formal. I remind the House that this is a specialist tribunal just for CervicalCheck cases. Like a commercial court or a specialist court, the tribunal does not have to go through and re-establish facts of law or science. That gets incorporated in it. The legal fees are lower in the tribunal than in the High Court. The facilities are specially designed. There are bespoke facilities, including private rooms, specifically for CervicalCheck hearings. Any woman, at any time, can immediately go to the High Court if she is not happy with how things are going in the tribunal. We have given tight assurances that there would be no penalties in terms of cost or anything else. The State has underwritten any potential liabilities for additional legal fees or else anything like that. The justice, the chair of the tribunal, has agreed that the tribunal will fully support and encourage mediation, which many of these cases will hopefully end up in.

Those are some of the advantages of the tribunal. In contrast to that, there is no advantage of the High Court over the tribunal - there is not one. That is why we introduced this legislation and set up the tribunal. In so many ways, we tried to set it up to be better than the High Court process. There is not a single criterion that I can find where the High Court is a better option than the tribunal. The debate has been that unless we get everything over the line, the tribunal is not what we wanted it to be - I accept that. There is nothing we would have wanted more. Part of my job is to lay out why the tribunal is a better option for the women and families because they are all who matter here. Let us remember, there is a default that at any given hour of any given day when a case is in the tribunal, a woman can say that it is not working for her and she can go back to the High Court. She can do that, and the State will cover any costs or issues there. I will finish with that. I thank the Chair for the extra time and colleagues for what has been an important debate this morning.