Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Independent)

The main issue is quality and cost. The Deputy knows from the report that our turn-around time is bad, our quality is poor and our cost is enormous. Clearly, from any perspective, that is not satisfactory. The intention is to go to tender and there has been discussion with stakeholders. One would hope that the public service would be successful in that tender but clearly it must compete on the basis of quality, turn-around time and cost. That must be the future because if we waste €200 million on this service that could be used in areas where we have deficiencies, be that in the child protection area or the many other areas where there are deficiencies, no one could defend that. Quest Diagnostics is in discussions about a public facility in Ireland with a view to putting facilities in place.

On the cervical screening, there was huge take up, there were 250,000 smears taken last year, with the number up this year. It is appropriate that we do it by way of letter so there are proper systems for recall. Given we only started cervical screening in September 2008, it has been highly successful and we want to see it develop further during 2010.

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