Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Nobody in this House is in any doubt as to how serious this situation is. I do not think any one party is any more outraged than any other. This is a disgraceful situation that should not have happened. We are now setting about and working with all of the other parties to put a comprehensive process in place that is transparent, open and will be reassuring to women who need that reassurance that we will understand fully how this happened, who was involved in the decision-making around the policy decisions that allowed this to happen, and people will be held to account in that context. In the meantime, we need a HSE that delivers to a Department of Health and, indeed, to a scoping process which will happen over the next six to eight weeks, and subsequently to a full investigation that will be put in place with, hopefully, the approval of everybody in this House. We will then get to the bottom of this as quickly as we can. In the meantime, we need to ensure that we build a new level of reassurance and confidence in the cancer screening processes in Ireland to ensure that the benefit we get from screening is maintained. Let nobody suggest here that there will not be full accountability with regard to who knew what and when. That is what we are trying to do now, in putting structures in place to make sure that is independently assessed by international experts who can provide the reassurance that we need. That is the approach that the Government wants to follow.

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