Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Dr. McKenna has his policy statement. We will be keeping an eye on it because it goes to the heart of everything that went wrong with this service. I probably have to say this because I get a lot of criticism for it. When I take the angle I am about to take, I am accused of being negative about CervicalCheck. I am not. I am a recipient of that service and a complete advocate for it. I am not trying to do it down. I am trying to examine forensically what went wrong, why it went wrong and how we should deal with things like this in the future.

This brings me to my next question. I think Mr. McCallion mentioned the EU rules on public procurement in terms of being able to deliver this service. My ears pricked up - not least because we are surrounded by problems involving public procurement in health. Could Mr. McCallion tease that out? I was looking at the services provided for screening around Europe because it struck me as very strange that we would always go to the US instead of trying to source from Finland, Germany or other parts of Europe that have state-of-the-art clinical laboratory testing. Could Mr. McCallion explain what the problems are?