Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister will be aware that Dr. Flannelly submitted to the committee recently that advice was offered and received by the Department indicating that the offer would fundamentally undermine the programme. This suggests that the Minister's response to my parliamentary question was not true. The Minister stated that any advice he received was significantly after the decision. However, evidence from Mr. Tony O'Brien that he asked the Minister to walk the decision back the following day suggests that the Minister's statement in that regard was not true either. The Minister also stated that the chief medical officer supported his decision. Evidence referred to by Susan Mitchell in the Sunday Business Post just three days ago that the chief medical officer supported a much more targeted approach suggests that statement was not true.

The committee has mounting evidence from multiple sources that the steps the Minister announced were advised against before the announcement, at least to a principal officer in the Department. Moreover, advice against this was received by email from the national screening service and from the director general of the HSE immediately after the announcement. Such advice was also given repeatedly in the months after the announcement. The evidence suggests that the Minister ignored all of that advice, and this has led to the delays in testing and in the introduction of the human papillomavirus, HPV, test.

We need to provision for this and there do not appear to be any provisions in these Estimates. As such, would the Minister like to correct the Dáil record? Given the evidence that the committee has received, it is difficult not to conclude that the committee and the Dáil have been repeatedly misled on the decision to offer a free out-of-cycle test. We now need to provision for that this year. Would the Minister like to take the opportunity to correct the Dáil record on that issue?