Ms Averil Power:

I will take part of that question if that is okay. I thank the Deputy for her question and for raising the national cancer strategy. It is very important that we do not lose sight of it. We are in this mire because of Covid-19 and we are also supposed to have a long-term national plan to improve our cancer services. From the Irish Cancer Society’s perspective, significant progress was made under the previous two strategies, which increased investment in the centralisation of services and greatly improved outcomes for patients. There is still a gap.

We were delighted when this national cancer study was published because there was a commitment to address the remaining gaps and bring cancer services up to a world-class standard. Lack of investment has been the problem. We are now a number of years into the strategy and last year was the first time, which we very much welcome, that the Government put very significant investment into the national cancer strategy. In the previous two budgets there was next to nothing and as a result things did not move.

The other difficulty from our point of view is monitoring progress because the data are not available for us. We go to great lengths in this area and my colleague, Ms Morrogh, can speak more to that issue on the lengths that she goes to try to get data from the National Cancer Registry Ireland, the National Cancer Control Programme, hospitals and different places to see if key performance indicators are being met. There are no ready sources of data to do that. As with any plan, it is very difficult to see if it is being implemented or if the resources are going to the right place if we are not collecting the data to hold the Government to account on it. We are investing and have a research call going out shortly where we are going to try to do that but it should not be up to the Irish Cancer Society to do this. If the committee can impress upon the Government and the Department to step up, that would greatly help all of us, the committee included.