Ms Vicky Phelan:

David was asking about the laboratories, the performance, the relationship between laboratories and whether they were preventing information getting to patients. With the memos last week we discovered that this was clearly the case with one of the laboratories in particular. That answered a question for us because we were wondering why there had been this delay of two years. My audit was triggered in October 2014 and then in July 2016, almost two years later, CervicalCheck contacted my gynaecologist to inform him that I was one of these cases and that he was to use his judgment on whether to inform me. It took another 15 months, until September 2017, before he actually did tell me. We were wondering what the delay had been. Gráinne Flannelly was interviewed on "Morning Ireland" and that interview answered one of the questions because she said it took them a while to come up with this communications strategy. That strategy had to be decided on and we were asking "Jesus, could that take two years?" That was one explanation. Then when these memos came out last week they showed that the laboratory was thinking about suing the HSE because it did not want the clinicians to know, let alone the patients. How long did that legal wrangling between the HSE and the laboratory go on for? My question is where was the patient in all of this? Nobody really cared about whether the patient should be told. It was about the legal wrangling between the HSE and the laboratory.