Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I will address some of my questions to Mr. Gleeson. In reading the memos last week and in reading some of the other material, it was obvious that what was being looked at was a kind of statistical analysis and whether it was within the expected range in circumstances in which, we have been told, screening is not 100% accurate in identifying what have been described as false negatives.

One of the points that was made last night by Mr. Cian O'Carroll was that within that there were some failures that were of a magnitude that should have been picked up. He expressed a concern that there may have been a closed mind because they were in the statistical range one would expect to see. Were those in the HSE of a closed mind when they saw the result? Did they look at individual results? Vicky Phelan spoke about the failure being identified in two previous smear tests she had.