Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

No. That is only the précis. The big issue relates to the Irish National Accreditation Board, INAB. I have gone through all of the documentation provided. I do not know whether any other member has done so. I spent last night going through it. I have raised issues regarding INAB at the committee many times. Its representatives appeared before us. I refer to the issues regarding quality assurance at the Manchester laboratory. In fairness, I asked the representatives of INAB when it found out that the Manchester laboratory was not accredited. What is really scary is that for a long time I have been chasing up what happened in regard to the second Scally report. I have outlined the full chronology in this regard in the Dáil, at this committee and at another committee on numerous occasions. The report was due in February. Something happened to ensure that it was not delivered. I asked Dr. Scally and the Minister on numerous occasions and in various ways why the report was not delivered on the date it was due. I asked the Secretary General at a meeting of the committee on 13 February and he truthfully told me it was imminent. Dr. Scally was due to appear before us the following day. In reply to a parliamentary question asked on 12 February, the day before, I was told the publication was imminent.

I sought information from INAB in other ways and, to its credit, it provided it. I had to go through the committee and ask it to get all of this documentation. In a letter to INAB on 1 February regarding MedLab Manchester, Dr. Scally outlines that he is in the course of completing the supplementary report, the publication of which is imminent and indicates that he would be grateful if his questions could be answered as soon as possible. On 6 February, he again wrote to INAB and stated that he was in the process of completing the report and would appreciate a response sooner rather than later. On 13 February, the same day I asked questions at this committee and was told the report was imminent, Dr. Scally wrote to Adrienne Duff regarding the lab. He stated that he would operate on the basis that the Manchester screening facility was covered by the accreditation INAB had given MedLab, as he had been told by Ms Duff the previous day. We all now know the truth in that regard. In the letter, Dr. Scally goes on to inform Ms Duff that the relevant section of his report was being finalised that morning and seeks written confirmation of what she told him on the telephone.

In fairness to the Secretary General of the Department, he told me at the committee meeting on 13 February that all quality assurance issues were being dealt with, that the terms of reference which were published - I am not sure whether they were fully engaged with - would be dealt with and that the report was imminent. The reality is very different. As a consequence of what happened regarding the non-analysis of the contracts, the lack of information on the labs, the discovery of this issue relating to Manchester and the quality assurance concerns I raised at the committee following requests from patient advocates, the report was not published for many months. Given that the Manchester laboratory was not accredited by INAB - it did not even know it existed - the consequences for the report were immensely serious.

Everything changed around that time. This is a jigsaw on which I have been working for the guts of six to eight months. This is the final piece in the jigsaw. If the meeting of this committee on 13 February had not happened, would this report have been published - it was about to be published - and would we ever have known about the quality assurance that was needed, the lack of quality assurance, the issues that had not been covered by the first report, the details of what happened regarding the Irish National Accreditation Board, INAB, and the Manchester laboratory, the process by which what happened with the Manchester laboratory came about and the fact that it can never be guaranteed that no other laboratories were used by screening providers with outsourcing because some of them no longer exist? Would we have known about any of this without that meeting of this committee? The trajectory of this report - when and how it was going to be published - changed dramatically over those days. I am glad it did because we subsequently obtained all the information but I am concerned about how a report that was originally 16 or 17 pages long increased to the size it was in the end. Much of this information and analysis will have been missed. I am not convinced that-----