Mr. John Gleeson:

The National Cancer Registry is a different statutory body. It is not part of the HSE so there are data protection issues in terms of the exchange of data. When we ask women whether they would like to participate in the screening programme, they give consent to share their information with the National Cancer Registry. It does not operate the other way, however. If the National Cancer Registry is registering a cancer — in our case, cervical cancer — it does not go the other way. The National Cancer Registry was given access to the cervical screening register in order to be able to report, in an aggregate way, on the programme. It is a question of whether, over time, we can reduce the incidence and whether the detection of cancer will start to move to an earlier stage to give a better prognosis. The national screening service measure was under way to implement a data-sharing agreement in line with the forthcoming GDPR to make that communication two-way. We also felt in the early years, however, that most of the women would not have engaged in cervical screening. There are roughly 1.2 million women between 25 and 60, and about-----