Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will move on. The court case concerns the fact that some people want their slides released but not in accordance with the HSE protocol. I think the essence of the case is not that people cannot get their slides. The HSE states that slides should be issued according to this protocol. People are saying they want their slides but not through the protocol. Deputy Catherine Murphy may correct me if I am wrong. I think this is why the HSE, from a centralised base, wants to maintain the chain of custody. It states that if slides are being transferred from laboratory to laboratory and from named physician to named physician, it wants this done in accordance with the protocol and it probably wants to maintain the integrity of that protocol rather than this happening outside of it. I am almost finished now, and Deputy Murphy may pick me up on anything she wants to pick me up on, but this is such an important issue that it is important to put this information out there. Then it states, "[A] firm has indicated that it wishes to have the High Court rule on the arrangements that should be applied to the release of slides where no legal proceedings are in being." They might not be in being now but they might be at a later date. The correspondence continues, "For completeness, it should be noted that...on 8 November last, the HSE had not received the information necessary to release slides relating to the 51 patients in question (i.e. the 18 patients who have issued proceedings and the 33 other patients who have not)." What had happened in these cases is that the HSE had identified the laboratory in Northern Ireland; however, it had not given the name of the responsible person in the laboratory. The HSE stated that it considers it likely that many of the requests that were referred to at our recent meeting are possibly part of that 51 in respect of which slides have not been released because the HSE has not been given the name of the person who was going to take custody for it in the laboratory in Northern Ireland. The correspondence gives the turnaround times relating to the slides in the table on the following page. If it looks as if I am defending the HSE, all I have been doing is summarising its position in its letter. The essence of the matter seems to be that there are a number of cases held up in which the person in the laboratory has not been identified and the HSE states it will not give a slide to a laboratory unless it knows who the responsible person is. Then there are other people who do not want to go through the HSE protocol. This seems to be the essence of the court case. I call Deputy Murphy. That is just my reading of the HSE's letter.