Ms Rachel Morrogh:

I do not think we are at that point.

Cancer takes a while to develop. That is why what we do next will chart the future of the people we mentioned earlier and those 450 cancers that have not been detected yet, or that we would have expected our screening programmes to detect during a four-month period under normal circumstances. We are worried that Covid was layered on top of a system that was not even meeting normal demand. Non-urgent services were postponed for a considerable amount of time because of the need to deal with Covid and we are now facing the choice of whether to fully resource, fund and look at what we need to do across the health services to meet the backlog, as well as the normal demand. The number of cancer cases in Ireland is increasing annually and we need to make choices that will build a sustainable cancer system because, as Deputies outlined, there will most likely be a second wave. What we do now is going to be critical.