Ms Fiona Murphy:

I will take that question. I co-chair the project board with the master of the Coombe, where the new screening laboratory is being built. Just today, I think, the next step of that is being considered by the Coombe board, and we hope to start building in January, with the intention that we will open up the laboratory in mid-2022. Our biggest rate-limiting step for that is, as we have mentioned a few times this morning, making sure we have the staff in place and that there is an adequately trained workforce available, but we have good plans in place towards that.

As to where we send all our samples, our ambition is that the new laboratory will become the main provider of screening in Ireland. We will always need a backup, both from the point of view of resilience and to ensure we build in a safety mechanism to make sure we always have somewhere to send samples. We have not yet chosen where that backup will be. That will be a discussion for us with the Coombe. We may have a joint agreement with another laboratory but we will have a backup, and I am very confident that that backup, if it continues with Quest, will be very safe for patients in Ireland. We have now had three different reviews of CervicalCheck, including a review of the laboratories and a review of Quest in the US. We personally conduct quality assurance visits to Quest, or at least we will do so again once we are able to travel to America, and we are very assured of the quality of the process it provides for us. Its rate of detection is similar to that of every other laboratory across the world. I would have no hesitation continuing with Quest if that is the route we go down in a few years. However, our ambition is, as I said, to bring the vast majority of those tests back to Ireland to redevelop cytoscreening in Ireland, and-----