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

I thank our guests for their work. We all have different roles here so I apologise in advance. I want to focus on the guy in the laboratory in Salford or Manchester first. My concern is that I have never heard of retrospective accreditation. To my mind, accreditation is the competence to do a test, and it is a bit late to get it when the test has already been done.

I read the report when it came out and read it again last night. How could Dr. Scally assume that a lack of accreditation had no impact? I hope I am wrong but my argument would be the following. There is a test with an accuracy rate of 70% and someone in a laboratory is getting a certain number of slides which then go into the mix with the rest of the medical laboratory slides. I know, from our most recent meeting, that it says on the slide which laboratory it was tested in. I imagine that is how our guests found out although perhaps it is not. Those slides are then thrown in with all the other slides and all the different cohorts of patients as we have discussed over the past year. I am trying to be as helpful as possible, but if the man from that laboratory in Salford had just left those slides in the boot of his car and, when the deadline to return them arrived, brought them in, signed his name on them and never tested them, it would make no material difference to the end figures because he was doing so few of them. That man's baseline, or that of his laboratory, was never tested. How can our guests definitively say it had no impact? I believe he could have left all the slides in the boot of the car.