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

I welcome the first thing the Deputy said about encouraging people to continue to believe in and to use the screening systems. We are reaching out to Opposition spokespeople, as the Minister did yesterday. My understanding is that Deputy Bríd Smith is the only person who did not agree with the way forward that has been charted from yesterday and that is her right. We are listening to other perspectives here to try to reach consensus on the most appropriate way forward. I do not think it is credible to suggest that the Minister knew about this before it was public. He has responded in a way that has put multiple changes in place immediately as well as putting a huge sense of energy and urgency into the system to try to establish facts.

He has been frustrated in those efforts, which has been hugely difficult to manage from a political perspective but, as he stated, his problems are not the issue here. Rather, the issue is the problems facing families and women which we must and will put right.

People will be held to account but first we must establish the full facts. This is not a matter on which we should shoot first and ask questions later. We should publicly establish an understanding of how this happened and whether it was a cock-up, as the Taoiseach said yesterday, or some kind of conspiracy, which I doubt. Until the full facts have been independently ascertained, we should be careful in what we say and who we blame. Natural justice should not be set aside because of people's understandable anger and anxiety.

As regards the outsourcing of testing, cervical smear tests are currently carried out by three institutions: Quest Diagnostics in New Jersey in the United States; MedLab Pathology Limited, which is a US company based in Dublin, although the testing takes place in a lab in the US; and the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital, Dublin. As the Taoiseach confirmed yesterday and on Tuesday, 50% of the testing is done in Ireland and 50% abroad. We have no reason to believe that the number of false negatives or false positives differ to any significant degree between the laboratories, but that will have to be established by a new independent inquiry to decide if the decision to outsource was a mistake. Some people believe it was, while others believe it was not.

We must not make judgments on these issues in the face of the emotion of this debate but rather on the basis of the facts as they are put together over time. That is how we should approach this to protect women.

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