Mr. Tony O'Brien:

To go back to the Deputy's question about the prediction Dr. David Gibbons made, I heard him saying that what is happening now is what he predicted. What is happening now is not what he predicted. What he predicted was that there would be a very high incidence of missed cancers. The chief medical officer has just taken us through an explanation of why that is not what we are experiencing. Dr. Gibbons did not predict that there would be a review process that would go so terribly wrong in terms of its communication to patients. That review process going terribly wrong has got nothing to do with where the slides were read. Such a review process would have had to occur wherever those slides were processed, including here, and there were such misses when the programme was based in Ireland in terms of its cytology process. If the same flawed process of communication had occurred, we would still be here having this discussion because it is fundamentally not about an excessive level of miss, taking into account the limitations of this test. Clearly, any miss is highly regrettable. While we have this programme, the whole purpose is to prevent cervical cancer. We do not take some satisfaction from the fact that the miss rate here is simply that which would normally be expected. We would wish we had a better test, and we will move to a better test, but what Dr. Gibbons predicted is not what we are experiencing. What we are experiencing does not vindicate the arguments he made ten years ago, however valid. This does not prove that he was right.