Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I support Deputies Cullinane and MacSharry. Deputy MacSharry has set out his serious concerns in his email. I will not repeat them but they are clearly set out. There are issues that must be looked at. We should consider bringing the State Claims Agency in before the committee. It comes under the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, which has also come before us. That is one avenue we could immediately look at to get clarification generally.

With regard to being penny wise and pound foolish, I sat on a health forum for ten years. I was there when the decision was made to privatise the service. I come from a city that had a first-class laboratory, which was used to roll out the first phase of the cervical smear tests because the laboratory was so good and it had such capacity. The problem arose for two reasons. First, the capacity of the public system was deliberately run down and the expertise was lost and second, a policy decision was made through a Progressive Democrats philosophy that outsourcing was good, cheaper, quicker and better. I must clarify this because it is about more than being penny wise and pound foolish. At the time we knew it was not. This was not me; it was the experts who were busily engaging with us in 2008. We clearly put this on the record, not because I was saying it or because I was on the left of the political spectrum, but because the experts were telling us that the decision was dangerous, wrong and would come back to haunt us. It is a fact that these opinions were absolutely ignored. Since then I have had details as to the expertise of the service. Even I was not aware of how expert it was and that it was chosen as a pilot project.

On the role of this committee, I do not know how we are to tease this issue out. Perhaps the Comptroller and Auditor General might help us. In value for money terms, nothing was presented to us to show that the service was more efficient or faster. No evidence of the sort was presented to us at the time. I would like to see the documents for the business case for changing the service providers. As with the business case for the strategic communications unit, what underpinned this outsourcing other than a philosophy that privatisation was best? There is scope for us to look seriously at the State Claims Agency or the NTMA, or whichever is the appropriate body, to come in to the committee. It is unacceptable that practical aspects were not answered two days ago in the Dáil. It now transpires there were 21 cases. Ten are active cases, six have initiated proceedings, four have written letters and there is one other case. The case numbers are rising on a daily basis. None of that practical information was available in the Dáil. I just wanted to put this into context.