Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister does not need to respond to this. I just want to reflect on CervicalCheck. I heard the Minister say to Deputy Lisa Chambers that he believes, knowing what he knows now, that it was the right decision to make. The Minister's Department was told at a principal officer level that his decision would crash the system. The Minister was repeatedly told throughout the year that his decision was crashing the system. We are now dealing with the results of the system having been crashed. Some 80,000 women have been waiting for up to eight months, with hundreds of thousands of women waiting for a HPV test. To state now that the decision was right is extraordinary and, in my opinion, is an insult to all of those women. We do not need to get back into it. We have had a good go at it. If the Minister wants to respond, that is fine, but we then want to move on to the children's hospital.