David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. We hear an awful lot about duty of candour in respect of whether women and patients should be given information through full disclosure. There is another issue in respect of duty of candour, namely, people like the witnesses giving information to committees like this one. For a lot of people in this room the witnesses have failed in that duty. Some of the information we did not get and stuff that was not said last week at the meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts shows a clear lack of duty of candour. I will put all my questions very respectfully, but I am very angry at some people in this room. I am sure most of them will have seen the hearing yesterday when we heard from Vicky and Stephen. We heard from Vicky's legal representative as well. He talked about a co-ordinated, premeditated, orchestrated strategy to minimise the volume of women who would be informed of the results of their smear. That is what happened, in my view.

When I heard the two Accounting Officers read their opening statements today, I heard a lot of hollow words from both of them. Mr. Connaghan said that if there is a requirement to hold people to account on the basis of their individual performances, this will be done. There is such a requirement and some of those people are in this room. We will put those questions to them today. There are people in this room who have questions to answer, who have failed those women, and we have a duty to put the questions to them. We will do so robustly and fairly but we do so with anger as well. We are representing those women and also the husbands and partners of women who passed away because of this scandal.

In terms of duty of candour, we also requested information which was delivered to the committee late last night. These were answers to questions that were submitted by Deputies to prepare us for this meeting. An Teachta Kelly, I and others submitted questions. We received the information about an hour before the meeting was due to commence and we had to suspend the meeting for an hour before we could proceed because of that. I want to register my disappointment at that. It is a practice that happened before Mr. Connaghan's time. We have always expressed our frustration and hoped the practice would stop. I respectfully request that in future we get the information as quickly as possible to allow us to do our job.

Part of the correspondence we got was a minute of a meeting of the CervicalCheck lead colposcopists group on 1 September 2017. Have the witnesses got that minute in front of them? Mr Connaghan has. This was a meeting of what I imagine is the steering group of the CervicalCheck programme. There were a lot of clinicians there and Dr. Gráinne Flannelly was there too. There was a very lengthy discussion about whether women should know. The minutes state that there was a general consensus that CervicalCheck should let women know prospectively about the process around the time of diagnosis. It talked about a perception that putting the onus on the clinicians to initiate the conversation was not correct and caused a deal of concern and negative feeling towards the programme on the part of clinicians. One of the clinicians who was there was Dr. Kevin Hickey, a consultant to Vicky Phelan. He had previously raised concerns with Dr. Gráinne Flannelly about informing the patients in cases he had dealt with. He had been told he should inform only three of the ten patients. When he asked Dr. Flannelly about this, she said a balance needed to be struck in deciding who needs a formal communication of the outcome of the audit and that the possibility of resultant harm was crucial. This is what angers and frustrates me. The response from Dr. Flannelly and the decision that was made at this meeting were astounding.

Dr. Flannelly spoke about producing an information leaflet. That was the response. An information leaflet was to be the big solution. When it got to decision time at that meeting, it was decided "to work up the leaflet(s) and changes to the process and discuss at a follow up meeting". Was the leaflet ever produced and can the committee have a copy of it? What changes were made to the process and why do we not have the information? What follow-up meetings were held and can the committee have the minutes for them?