Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I have found today's session very useful. I have gone through the report in great detail but I found particularly useful the information on the 18-month and 12-month cut-off being dialled up. In the last week, it has become an issue of higher importance for the inquiry team and today it becomes an issue of huge importance for us. The comment on patient advocates is spot-on. Demographically, it is impossible to get the appropriate people to sit on all of these groups unless there is going to be some form of recompense for their time off work. One will not get people of my age or younger to join a group because of the cost of child care and so on. That must be dealt with and as a committee we should advocate a payment.

We will not get to it now, but the RCOG review will not deal with the question I have asked about why the laboratories were not investigated under their contracts when issues were found. That needs to be dealt with somewhere. In fairness to Dr. Scally, he has said that quality control was, in effect, a joke and was not in place after 2014. We do not even know what was going on or who was accountable. All of that must be encapsulated somewhere. It is a big chunk that was missing. It is no one's fault, but it is missing.

I have a question on the inquiry team's follow-up work on the laboratories and outsourcing. I have read the commentary on this in the report in detail. Is the team confident that there are not other locations and laboratories to which some of these laboratories may have outsourced on top of what we know now? In other words, is this limited to just those laboratories?

As regards accountability, I have no confidence in the HSE investigating itself. Given the day that is in it, there will have to be some second-phase forum involving Dr. Scally on accountability for what we have just discussed, namely quality assurance and contract management. I am with Dr. Scally on the people working in CervicalCheck in Limerick. They are not the issue here. It is higher up the food chain.

It has often been missed that the audit has stopped. What are the consequences of that? Are we going to have a delayed problem here? If everything has stayed the same, including the parameters, are we going to have additional issues with women potentially not having information? Given that the audit has stopped, there will be no disclosure. How is that going to be dealt with? This is a live issue today.

My final question relates to another live issue. To be fair to the Minister, he has probably admitted, albeit it may have been a mistake, the fact that slides are going out of date and that women are having to wait long periods for their smears. How are we going to deal with that fact given the commitment the Minister has made?