Professor Fidelma Flanagan:

I thank the committee for the invitation to attend the meeting today. The Covid period has been a particularly challenging and difficult 20 months for cancer screening services. The screening programme is targeted at a low general population, namely, people who are at lower risk of the disease. Unfortunately, faced with public health advice that we must limit our service, we had to pause the programme for nine months in total. The Senator asked specifically about the number of people we screened prior to the pandemic. A total of 170,000 women were screened prior to the Covid period. We then paused the programme for six months-----