Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I have three questions, two on CervicalCheck and one on the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund. One is a follow-up to that of Deputy O'Brien, whose questioning was very revealing. Deputy O'Connell and I are on the health committee and the Committee of Public Accounts and we have gone through this intricately for months. I have probably attended eight to ten committee meetings on the subject. I have probably been at every committee meeting, between everything, yet it is a drip-feed. I am seriously worried, now that the Houses of the Oireachtas are about to go into recess, that the greatest form of transparency emerging in this actually transpires in these rooms. The Houses are to be closed for the next couple of months.

With regard to what Deputy O'Brien teased out, I do not want to wrong Mr. Breen; he did give figures before. Maybe we could have gone further in the way we teased it out so I do not want to wrong Mr. Breen. I must ask him, however, on having taken down his figures, whether he can break down the categories of claims of the 12, four and one, or 17 cases, in other words. We know we have 221 cases and that there are 17 in the "others" category. It would be revealing, informative and educational to know what types of cases the 17 cases are.

We know of one because in fairness, Deputy O'Brien has raised it on a number of occasions. What are they? I am meeting the Minister for Health later on today and I would like to know whether these 17 cases are part of the Scally review. I doubt he even knows. I am sure some of his people are watching this. I would like to be able to ask. Is there any way Mr. Breen can break that down for us today? If not, I would be surprised because I think he should be able to do so.

If one teases it out, this case is pre-Vicky Phelan. If Vicky Phelan had not come out and blown the lid off all of this, what would have happened? Are there issues here relating to non-disclosure preceding Vicky Phelan that we do not know about? Why were we not aware of cases like this? Are there issues relating to the laboratories that are involved in these 17 cases that are outside the 221 cases that we need to know about?

The third question is a catchall. Mr. Breen has been before us a number of times. On occasion, through our own fault, we might not have probed things to the level they should have been probed. I think we often do but perhaps we do not. I say this with the greatest will in the world and am putting this out there because of what the Chairman said. Is there anything Mr. Breen needs to tell us or members of the public who are watching about this issue; is there anything we need to know? There are three parts to the first question. I have two more questions.