Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The second issue is that we are dealing with the biggest health crisis in decades. In this situation we all know the issues relating to management in CervicalCheck and confidence and so on. The programme manager came in here and gave us information which we now know to be inaccurate. In that scenario, we have to question having confidence in a management team that appears before the committee and gives information that, for whatever reason, is inaccurate. Not alone is it inaccurate but it is based on a case that was in the High Court. This is pretty serious stuff and we will have to have a discussion about what we do about this. If the SCA had not written to us last week, we would be none the wiser. It begs the other question: what else is inaccurate? What else do we not know about? It raises a serious question for Mr. Connaghan. What will he do about it? He has a management team, previous and current, that has given inaccurate information to the Committee of Public Accounts based on a High Court case. If Vicky Phelan had signed the confidentiality clause, we would not even be talking about it in the first place. This raises deeper questions. We should write to the SCA, verify that it agrees 100% with the context and the way in which the letter was written and ask if it has any other further clarifications or information it wants to give to us. Second, we have to seriously consider the impact of being given information like this which is completely inaccurate for us and which is based on other evidence given to us. Dr. Scally is doing his report but we have to consider what our next steps will be as regards actioning something on this.