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

I thank the witnesses for coming in. It is nice to see Mr. Teap again. Ms Walsh is very welcome. I will pick up where she left off when she spoke about wanting "to stop looking backwards" and needing "to start looking forward now". It is probable that nothing more important has been said here today. We need to work together. This has been going on for a long time. There is a lot of hurt. There is a lack of trust. Many of us in this committee have uncovered things. At the time, we were made to feel stupid as well. Everything came out in the wash in the end.

Deputy O'Reilly spoke about the 10% limitation rate, or whatever arbitrary rate it was, that we were quoted here at an early stage. The lack of knowledge about the limitations of screening caused a lot of trouble from the start for the witnesses and for those of us who were trying to get to the bottom of things. At the end of the day, we are all trying to improve people's lives and improve survival rates.

I would like to examine some of the witnesses' proposals. Before the regime started, we had the highest rate in Europe of people dying of cervical cancer. I take it from what the witnesses have said that one of the negative aspects of advances in healthcare is that it is not good enough for those who have survived life-limiting conditions to be able to say that they have lived if they cannot live the best lives they possibly can after their aggressive, invasive and personal treatment has come to an end. I fully support Ms Walsh's call for supports for oncofertility treatment. It is tragic for a woman to have to shelve her dreams of having children at an early age because of a lack of direction or support at a moment when she could have done with such assistance. I would be very supportive of that.

I would like to look back at this from the start, insofar as that is possible. The witnesses have tried to find the truth and to restore trust in a system in which many of us had lost faith. Although many of us had faith in Dr. Scally's recommendations, I understand Mr. Teap's point that it is not good enough just to tick boxes. We need to track these recommendations and make sure they do what they set out to achieve. From day one, there was a huge lack of governance in the HSE with regard to the handling of the cervical cancer issue. As Dr. Scally said, the system was "doomed to fail at some point". One of the greatest failings of this whole debacle relates to the impact of having an audit without considering that there were real people at the end of it who had lost their lives. It showed a complete disregard for Mr. Teap's late wife, for his children and for our lives as people. Not much consideration was given to the significant investment in this area, the whole point of which was to prevent the things that happened to Mr. Teap from happening.

I understand that all of this is very hard because I have had difficulties with it. Members of the committee met representatives of RCOG a couple of weeks ago. We will see them again in the morning. There are many questions we have to ask.

I do not want to misquote Ms Walsh, but I do understand that everything falls within the limitations of screening. As a logical human being, it is very hard to swallow when we see that despite the best efforts, somehow some people's lives appear to have been saved. There was the outsourcing of the service abroad, which many people had an issue with at the time. There was the lack of concordance with the standards on the contracts with regard to the American College of Pathologists versus other standards. There was the explicit statement in the contract that there was to be no outsourcing to other laboratories, yet this happened. There was the issue of people going on quality assurance visits and not noticing pretty much anything that was going on. Then we had the guy in Salford just to finish it off. Does Deputy Kelly remember this individual who was on his own?