Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to reflect. Mr. McCallion stated earlier, quite nobly, that he took responsibility for a lot of what is happening upon his team and the HSE. I think he is taking responsibility for the wrong thing. Largely, the crisis of confidence was caused by politicians in the Oireachtas. It was partly caused by Members of the Oireachtas outside of Government and by how the Oireachtas reacted given that it conflated clinical outcomes for women with non-disclosure. I am of the view that the Minister largely created the issue. He was warned weeks in advance that the Vicky Phelan case was going to emerge and that it was likely to cause a crisis of confidence. No preparations whatsoever were made and those involved have admitted that. Within 48 hours, the Minister expressed no confidence in the members of the senior management team at CervicalCheck without meeting them. He never met those people and never asked their opinion. That was largely taken as the Government having no confidence in CervicalCheck programme. Having created anxiety and fear, an offer of free tests was made. We now know there was very strong clinical advice not to do that.

CervicalCheck failed in not closing the audit loop, although it is worth noting that it failed to complete a loop that no other programme on earth even tried to perform. It failed at the end of an audit process in trying to be the best programme in the world in terms of audit and feedback to the women involved. To suggest that this failure would lead to a crisis of clinical confidence among women is, I believe, not true. The mishandling of this matter by the Minister caused the crisis of confidence which, as we now know, gave rise to this huge backlog, to there being no date for the HPV test to be introduced and to 79,500 women waiting for their results.

What the HSE needs to accept responsibility for, and it may well do, is the response to that. I do not think Mr. McCallion's team created this mess at all and it was largely created by the Minister and the Government, aided and abetted by the Oireachtas. There was certainly loose language within the Oireachtas which was very unhelpful as well. However, it is the HSE's mess to clear up. I was deeply disappointed when I received a reply in the past few days stating that the number had risen. On the previous occasion on which we met, the number was 78,000. It was the expectation of all here that when we met again, that number would have fallen, particularly as many of these women are experiencing acute anxiety. In fact, the number has risen. That is extraordinary, particularly when one considers the free tests which caused all of this were stopped months ago. I was expecting Mr. McCallion to state that it had been 78,000, it had fallen to 55,000 and it will be cleared by whatever date. Unfortunately, his team does have to accept responsibility for some of that, notwithstanding the very difficult international context, which is what I want to come to next.

Mr. McCallion stated, "Our market engagement has identified significant challenges and concerns in the provider community". What is the problem? Is it that there is just not the cytology capacity anywhere? Is it a fact that there is capacity but that international providers are scared of the political, reputational or litigious contexts relating to Ireland? While this is not the HSE's fault, it is galling that women, in a phenomenal public screening programme - one of the most successful public screening programmes of its kind anywhere in the world - are waiting eight months for results. What they hear is that it is not possible to access cytology capacity but that if they want to pay €100, they can get their results in two weeks. Clearly, cytology capacity does exist because women who can afford to do so are just paying for their results. One of the wonderful things about the screening programme is that it did not fall foul of our awful two-tier healthcare system. If it is the case that the HSE simply cannot source the capacity because the capacity is not out there, how is that women can bypass that and obtain results by paying? If there is cytology capacity out there and if those who have it are refusing to provide it to the HSE, why is that the case?