Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am still trying to figure out all the facts. I appreciate the Deputy's sentiment that decisions we make on this should be based on facts. We are really letting people down, particularly the women of Ireland, with regard to women's health if we make decisions that are not based on fact. We do not yet have all the facts. That is why we need to have the HIQA inquiry. That is why we need a little bit more time to get to the bottom of this. I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to know all the facts. I want to make sure we can restore confidence in our cancer screening service. If one takes the entire audit, which I think included 1,400 cases in total, there were 208 false negatives. That is 208 people who had smear tests that were reported as normal but who then went on to develop cancer. We cannot say how many of those were false negatives yet within the margin of error. We cannot say for certain. Very sadly, those 208 people have cancer. Some of them are very sick and 17 have passed away, very sadly. We cannot say with certainty that had there been a different test done in a different lab that those cancers would have been picked up. I see from one of the notes today that a slide was looked at by eight specialists - eight cytologists. They are scientists who are experts in this field. Eight of them were asked to look at a sample. They were told the woman had been diagnosed with cancer; five of the eight could not see the cancer cells and three could. These tests are not 100% accurate. They are subjective. There is a degree of margin of error. We will do our best over the coming period to try to explain.

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