Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry, but when Mr. Woods says things such as that it will depend on how the market responds it does not fill me with a massive amount of confidence. The market responds by making as much money as the market can make and Mr. Woods knows that as well as I do.

The catch-up programme is something I raised with the previous Minister for Health on a number of occasions. We know there has been a lot of missed screening. We know exactly why this is and how necessary it was. Nobody was calling for screening services to be restarted at a stage when they simply could not have been restarted. We understood that. I checked the record before I came here and I never really got a satisfactory answer to the question I had put to the Minister on a number of occasions. There are a number of issues with regard to the catch-up programme that will be needed. If we take CervicalCheck as one example, we all know what happened when a commitment was given on tests without the capacity in the laboratories having been secured. We saw what happened there. I am sure nobody wants to go back to that. Has additional laboratory capacity been secured to be able to complete the catch-up programme? Has a target been set for the number of missed screenings that will take place before the end of the year? Does the HSE have a longer-term plan for catching up on screening? The figures from the Irish Cancer Society this morning with regard to missed cancers are very worrying. We all fully appreciate why screening could not take place but does the HSE have a catch-up programme in mind and has it secured the additional capacity in the laboratories that will be necessary to be able to deliver on it?