John Moloney (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

Possibly. I appreciate being allowed to contribute to this debate. Coming from County Laois I am close to the issue we have been debating for the past few hours. I extend my good wishes to the nine women involved, their families and also the numerous women who were called back to the hospital for a re-check and their families. I add a word of encouragement to the staff in Portlaoise hospital who clearly have been equally traumatised by the exposure of the hospital and its facilities.

I acknowledge the Minister's immediate acceptance of responsibility, for which I thank her. I have every confidence in her, regardless of what has been said in the House in this and previous debates. I also acknowledge Professor Drumm's apology which I hope will go a little further. I also hope that in the short term the recommendations of the John Fitzgerald report will be acted upon as quickly as possible by the HSE; otherwise, it will be virtually impossible to restore confidence in the service and, in particular, the HSE. The quicker the HSE comes to grips with the recommendations the better for all health services throughout the region.

The most important finding in the report concerns the need to have central locations. Some are opposed to the term "centres of excellence" but whatever we call them, that is the way forward. I support the notion of centres with triple assessment, the most modern and high-tech equipment and, more importantly, committed, skilled medical experts who meet numerous patients and upskill. This is in contrast to what we have seen where we had something like 30 centres dealing with fewer than 20 new cases per annum. That is a positive move which has come from all of this.

Since the debate began on hospital services in the midlands I have not been to the forefront on the issue in public as, having supported the selection of Tullamore over my own county hospital in Portlaoise in the 1990s, people took offence to my utterings on any issue because they considered that, first, I had let down my own county and, second, I was not with the people of County Laois. Nothing could be further from the truth but it took a long time for people to sit back and think about the implications.

It is a tragedy that Opposition Deputies should try to target the Minister on the issue of Portlaoise General Hospital. I was delighted and surprised to hear Deputy Shatter say what I was going to say, namely, that if in 1999 the Deputies and health board members in County Laois had taken the advice of the National Cancer Forum, independently advised by Professor James Fennelly, this debacle would not be happening in Portlaoise today and, in fact, we would not even be debating this issue.

When the hospital in Tullamore was selected as the lead centre, a row erupted in County Laois and I remember leading a delegation to the Department of Health and Children. We asked for Professor Fennelly to attend that meeting, with the then Minister, Deputy Cowen, to explain why the hospital in Tullamore had been selected. We were told that, first, it was located in the centre of the region; second, that we could have all of the services located there required for cancer treatment and, third, that finance had been committed. I changed my mind at that meeting and said on my return to County Laois that I was opting for the hospital in Tullamore rather than the one in Portlaoise. We lost valuable time through people attacking the position of members of the Laois group in the health board who at the time saw the sense in having one centre in the region long before Professor Tom Keane saw it. If we had followed that strategy, no blame would attach to anybody because we would have done the right thing.

During the course of the debate reference was made to the fact that the Minister was not responsible for the machine and that a letter had been lost. That is no more than a convenient argument. We can go back and discuss the real issue. Deputy Flanagan was to the fore at the time in challenging the decision in the High Court. I have listened to all of this for years. I heard it said that because Deputy Cowen was a friend of mine he told me the centre must be located in Tullamore. The reality is that for the three years of debate I supported and still support the position of the then Minister, Deputy Noonan, who was the one who selected the hospital in Tullamore. If it had been selected and Government policy had been adhered to, we would not be having this debate today. I do not see why the Minister should be the target.

It is worth noting what the judge said in his summing up. I would have welcomed it if people accepted the judge's recommendations and advice but instead we were made out to be the ones who had let the county down. We should remember that the argument was that it was a political decision to locate the services in Tullamore because Deputy Cowen lived there. On 10 May 1990 Mr. Justice Kearns indicated that the September decision of the board to locate the chemotherapy services in Tullamore was not a capricious volte-face carried out for no apparent reason or motive, of which we were accused, nor was it made for purely political reasons, of which we were also accused, but instead was soundly founded on a number of expert reports to which I continued to refer throughout 1999 and 2000. Even then——

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