Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

I am not certain whether we have one or two laboratories but it is a very small number. I will confirm that. There may be a second one. We have very few accredited laboratories. Now that we are moving rapidly into the whole issue of standards and quality assurance it is clearly important, if we are to have national roll-outs, that the test results are accurate in so far as they can be.

The national cancer screening programme is not part of the HSE at the moment. The resources that are currently used on what are called opportunistic smears will be diverted to the screening programme. Many clinicians have been looking for that for quite some time. I will not speculate on why that did not happen to date. Screening programmes are expensive. They take time. We must direct our services more into screening. Screening for colorectal cancers will be next. It is hoped that can be done as quickly as possible given that those are the three areas where we know screening works. Relatively few people have a problem but it can be fatal for the few that do if it is not picked up early.

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