Kate O'Connell (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)
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Given all of these things, it is only logical for me and Ms Walsh to ask how it could fall within the limitations of screening. We have listened to the witnesses today and we will interrogate more witnesses tomorrow hopefully. I stated last week at a meeting of the committee that I have faith in the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists with respect to its professional capacity and whose side it is on. In terms of somebody having a smear looked at - not the one on which the diagnosis was made but the one previous to that - I have a major concern that the default position was that it was concordant. I hope I am not misinterpreting what Ms Walsh said in that regard earlier. That is a serious flaw in the review and I hope to interrogate it more at tomorrow's meeting.

I do not want to trivialise the administration issues - for want of a better term - but the witnesses spoke of getting a smear result that was over-labelled or re-labelled. The whole point of the RCOG review was to instil confidence in a system we had lost confidence in. I can only imagine what it must have been like to receive a call to say that a slide was missing and then that it was concordant and then that somebody else's label was on it. That all feeds into the view that this was sloppy work that has had a real impact on people's lives - the witnesses' lives in this case.