Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Brilliant. I thank the Chairman.

What is the annual cost of CervicalCheck? I am talking about the entity that is CervicalCheck from the time it was established to last year. What was the annual spend for that? The witnesses may not have this to hand. I am talking about staffing costs, the running of the building and also the contract costs to the different labs. I do not need to know the amount for each lab. I am looking for a figure for the bill for the work.

Having sat through more than a year of this, I have concerns that by the looks of things there was no quality assurance and no governance. Everybody was moving around different jobs and we cannot find out who was where and when. Other than sending out a reminder letter, I find it really hard to know what people in CervicalCheck have been doing for the past ten years. How much was it costing to allow them to do whatever they were doing there? Although I am very supportive of the Scally report, that does not answer everything. All it does is lay out to us in black and white some of the questions we have had for the past year. It does not fix any of the historical issues. While I am very happy to draw a line in the sand and move on to HPV vaccination and eradicate cervical cancer and associated cancers, this committee needs to identify what was going on for ten years so that it never happens again either here or elsewhere.