Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Is the scoping inquiry enough? No, absolutely not. It has been set up and is independent. We will leave Dr. Scally and Dr. Denton to their work. What I have heard from colleagues from all political parties and groupings and most importantly what I have heard from women who have been impacted by this was that they did not want us to hand this issue over to a commission or something that would go on forever and a day. They wanted us to try to get as many answers as we could as quickly as we could and also identify the other issues that would require a commission. Therefore, the Government decided yesterday that there will be a statutory commission of investigation. The following questions will arise when Dr. Scally's work is concluded. What questions have been satisfactorily answered? What do we know the answers to? What remains to be answered?

I also call it a phoneline. I said this in the Dáil last night and I know Mr. O'Brien has said it here today. There is a view that people are not getting calls back because of resources. That is genuinely not the truth. I have been scrutinising this. Many more people have been trained up to prepare the calls. Women are ringing up with personal information and quite rightly wanting answers to their own clinical situation, which then often requires a clinician going off looking at the situation and then a nurse or doctor coming back. A total of 3,649 of those calls have been concluded in the sense that the information has gone back. Damien McCallion is here today. I heard him give a public commitment that the overwhelming majority of them will be concluded by the end of this weekend and that is still the aim.

While I will not go into it in detail now, the Deputy hit the nail on the head in asking what we can do to build confidence now in a practical sense. I met representatives of the Irish Cancer Society for about an hour last week. They had some very practical logical things that I would like to do with them. I would very much welcome any ideas. The move to HPV testing will provide us with an opportunity to nearly restart the conversation with the women of Ireland. It will also give us an opportunity to reconfigure labs and all of that. Therefore, a big opportunity is coming up later this year.