Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Dr. Scally, Dr. Denton and Mr. McQuillan. I want to start by thanking the witnesses and acknowledging the work they have done. They were brought into the eye of a storm with a lot of political heat, but much more importantly, there were a lot of women all over the country who were very worried and scared about questions on the clinical quality of the testing that had been done, the labs that were being used and so forth. The expertise and hard work of the witnesses over the past year on several reports has gone a long way to addressing that, so I acknowledge that work and thank them for that.

In a few minutes I will get into some of the questions on these extra labs. Many of us were shocked, as I imagine the witnesses were, that we went from six labs to 11 labs to 16 labs. That raised serious questions around how this happened and if the labs were of sufficient quality and so forth. That was detailed in the report and I will move to that in a second but before I do that, I want to step back from the detail. There are still many women around the country whose confidence in this programme has been shaken. My understanding of the programme is that it has been highly effective in terms of clinical outcomes, with about a 7% reduction year on year in cervical cancer that can be linked back to the start of the programme. It was not happening anyway. There is a link there that presumably is a causal relationship. As an ancillary, there will be many other people looking at the other screening services and asking if bowel screening and breast screening are in good shape because these questions have been raised about CervicalCheck.

My understanding of Dr. Scally's first report is that at a clinical level, putting aside the real issues around governance that were uncovered, the programme as it ran and as it still runs to this day, is of the highest quality and the issues that have surfaced are issues of governance and non-disclosure, which are very real issues around a patient's right to know. Ultimately, however, at a clinical level, this has been and remains clinically sound at the top international levels and women in Ireland who are looking at CervicalCheck have every reason to have confidence in the clinical efficacy of the programme and its ability, imperfect as it is, to help to detect and treat cervical cancer and pre-cancer. That is my understanding but I would really like the witnesses' views. Is that still the view of the witnesses, having had many more months to look into the weeds even further?