Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It does not make sense to me. I am not accusing anybody of telling lies or giving misinformation or whatever nice version one wants to use about lying. As we all heard, Professor Scally has a history of dealing with stuff like this in other organisations. It does not make sense that it would be acceptable to somebody at his level to receive scanned documents on a disk or a USB stick. Neither he nor anyone at his level would think it was practical to go through documents in that manner. It is not believable and I find it incompetent that scanned documents would be given in a format that was not searchable, as Mr. Connaghan said. It is a needle in a haystack job. It is not the way to go about it. That it took until 11 June to find out that this was the format in which he had been given the information does not add up.

Many of us on the Committee of Public Accounts and the Joint Committee on Health, including me, believe we are constantly met with resistance, avoidance of disclosure and every barricade that can be put in our way in our engagement with the HSE. For the public looking in, I estimate the combined salaries of the witnesses present per year to be in the region of €2.5 million, leaving the rest of us out of it. I have said here before and at the Joint Committee on Health that we are dealing with a population the size of that of Manchester. For normal people looking in, this is madness. It is a dysfunctional system that is rotten to the core and not fit for purpose. We have all of the witnesses, many of whom do great work, but committee members are like a court of law. Deputy Jonathan O'Brien has to read transcripts and we then start dancing on the head of a pin with words such as "assurances" and "assumptions". The last time we had the word "feelings" from Dr. O'Keeffe. All of this language does not give us answers and, to my mind, it is a complete waste of time. Somebody needs to take control. I thought Mr. Connaghan was in control, but the fact that he has admitted that he has only met Dr. Scally once, which was at the outset, seems mad. It seems reasonable on something of this magnitude that he would be meeting Dr. Scally on a weekly basis to be updated. To have to sit here on a such beautiful day land listen to Mr. Gleeson talk about things he had "assumed" is disrespectful to us and the public.

I do not buy the notion that somebody thought that giving scanned, unsearchable documents was the way forward. It seems to be a deliberate attempt to stop information from being received. I do not buy either the notion of not having statutory authority because I have often inquired of the primary care reimbursement service, PCRS, and it seems people with no medical qualifications have access to medical records. The issue can be dealt with. Many people go to doctor A for treatment and doctor B gets to see their files and there is no confidentiality issue. It is just another barricade put in our way in trying to get the answers.

I just wonder what the point of all the witnesses is at this stage. They are not able to answer us. Who is to blame? Is it the labs, the audit process, the system, politics or something else? We are still here. I do not know what is the point of this meeting. It must be the tenth or 12th meeting with the witnesses I have attended and we are no further along. There is no point to the witnesses being here because they are not giving us answers. If this is - I am trying to think of a word that does not include bad language - the mess we are in, they clearly cannot manage things.

The public and the medical people are becoming more annoyed because we are now undoing all the good that was done through the screening process in this country over ten years. We will probably reverse our 7% reduction in cervical cancer rates. The whole negativity around this is bad for public health, which, as far as I am concerned, it is supposed to be the witnesses' job to protect. I am a Government Deputy and I just think the whole lot of them should be sent packing and we should get new people to do this. It is the middle of June. This has been going on for weeks now and we are none the wiser. We are looking at people who are paid with taxpayers' money and who are supposed to be accountable to us telling us "Well, maybe", "Oh, I assumed this" and "I felt this". I just do not have any time for it because I do not buy it. It reminds me of when I used to try to get away with things with my parents when I was a teenager and I tried to baffle them with my various versions of the story so they would not know where I was. That is what the witnesses have managed to do today. We do not know who is in charge, who is accountable or what qualifications people have. I looked at the organisational structure of the HSE and it has changed in the past two days. The HSE has been shifting the deck-chairs around on the Titanic as well. It is just insulting. The witnesses' continuous behaviour at these meetings is insulting to the elected Members of this House and to the public. It is a waste of our time.