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

The offer of repeat smear tests was a response to concerns expressed by women. A large number of women who contacted the helpline wanted to have a repeat test and the Minister for Health responded to that by making it available. The possibility of a look-back is under consideration but that would be based on a smear that may have been taken six months, a year or maybe two years ago or longer. A more up-to-date test might be the best way to get reassurance for people who want it.

As I told the Dáil last Wednesday, the Government's intention is to establish a redress scheme. The first thing we must do is establish the facts of the case and we do not yet know all the facts. There are women for whom open disclosure did not occur. While the State may not have a legal liability in that regard, in my view it does have a moral liability and consequently we will need to provide redress to women who were not told this important information about their health. We also will need to look at the various different cases, of which there are approximately 166, of women who were diagnosed with cervical cancer where it subsequently turned out they had been given a false negative smear. We will need to examine that in some detail because there are different forms of false negative, namely, those within acceptable bounds of normal margin of error and those which should not have been missed. Part of what we are doing is ensuring that this clinical review is undertaken not just of the 208 women, but of all 1,400 who were part of the cervical screen audit.

On Tuesday night, the Minister for Health announced that about 1,600 cases that had been notified to the national cancer registry of Ireland had not been notified on to CervicalCheck. Much work has been done in recent days to go through that. We can confirm that the vast majority of those 1,600 cases will not need to be part of the audit because, as we suspected at the time, many of those women did not have a smear test or had not had one for a very long period. We will have the exact figures quite soon.

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