Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will be supporting the motion and thank the Members of the Rural Independent Group for tabling it. I will confine my comments to the CervicalCheck issue.

It has been said the chief executive of the HSE will not be turning up at the Joint Committee on Health at 9 a.m. I might be breaking some protocol, but, as the Acting Chairman of the Committee on Public Accounts on Thursday, he has informed us that he will not be turning up at it either. That is a disgrace. I ask the Minister, at whatever time he wants to do so, to take out his mobile phone and ring Mr. Tony O'Brien to tell him that he has to turn up. I believe nobody in this House would disagree with the Minister on that issue. Mr. O'Brien is not willing to turn up at the Joint Committee on Health, chaired by Deputy Michael Harty, at at time of national crisis when accountability is the real issue, as well as making sure the women concerned are protected. Furthermore, he will not turn up at the Committee of Public Accounts, the only constitutional committee in the State at which we will be asking questions related to the HSE, the Department of Health and the National Cancer Registry. I will not blame the Minister and we will not find fault with him if the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, has to stay in the Chamber while he has to leave tjo make a phone call because it is deeply unacceptable in the extreme and for the public watching these proceedings, it is a bloody disgrace. Mr. O'Brien has to be accountable. He is the chief executive officer of the HSE.

I want to confine my comments to a few issues and raise some concerns. First, obviously, we know the issues with the helpline. Let me make some suggestions. There are real issues about the volume of women with deep concerns. Will the Minister consider taking a random sample of smear tests undertaken in the past three years, given that is the cycle of smear tests involved and doing it quickly to give an initial stimulus of public confidence to the women concerned? We cannot get through all of them in that space of time. Therefore, we need something that will give confidence. Second, will the Minister, please, try to bring forward or fast-forward the introduction of the human papilloma virus, HPV, test because, ultimately, it will deal with many of the issues involved? It would be far more successful. It is something that has been proved in other jurisdictions. There will be issues with IT and laboratory space, but they can be dealt with. Third, will the Minister, please, go to the Health Information and Quality Authority to ask for an early health technology assessment of the HPV vaccine for boys? These three measures would absolutely help in giving confidence in dealing with this issue.

I am pleased about the scoping inquiry. At times during the past week or so I felt more like an adviser to the Minister than a political opponent. Is it new politics? I do not know, but the Minister has taken our views on board. In particular, there were many here who felt a HIQA-led inquiry was the right solution. It was not, as I said from the beginning. Now we are going down the route I expected we would have to go down and I thank the Minister for listening. However, I do have other issues. We know what the position is on open disclosure. We heard it at the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach today when Mr. Ciarán Breen, head of the State Claims Agency, essentially said if they were not indemnified, they would have no choice but to continue the process on the claims taken by the women concerned. That means that they are locked in to the process. This has to change and if it needs legislative change, we should do it quickly. We would support the Minister in that regard.

We also found out that all ten legal cases being taken involve US laboratories. Was the Minister aware of this? When was he and his Department made aware of this? There has been a systemic and systematic failure of management across the health service, multiple organisations and the Department. I met the representatives from the Department last Tuesday at 3.30 p.m. Deputy Howlin, other colleagues and I were with them for an hour and 15 minutes. During that time, they were not aware of how many legal cases were being taken. I had to ask them to ask the State Claims Agency how many legal cases were being taken so that they would know for the meeting of the Joint Committee on Health the following morning. I asked them the same question again. If I had not asked them the question, I doubt they would have known. They were also unaware of any issues relating to the other cases the Minister had to bring to the attention of the Dáil, which he told us he was only made aware of beforehand. We now know there are 1,600 of those. We know they are categorised differently from the first batch of cases because of the circumstances in which these women got cancer or were tested. However, it is deeply worrying that the Minister was only told this at the last minute. It was the biggest debate in which the Minister has participated to date in his political life and he was just given this information beforehand. It does not add up for me. I do not believe the Minister is being told everything. I do not believe his Department even knows everything. If it does, it is certainly not telling the Minister. A cursory glance at the National Cancer Registry figures would have shown that only half of the women had been audited. How in the name of God is it possible that not one single individual within cervical screening, the overall screening programme, the HSE or the Department realised the differential between the two figures? The Minister has told me how he was told. I need him to find out who told the safety incident management team and who told Mr. Lynch about the differential and how they brought that information to him.

I had a discussion over the weekend with someone who was involved in CervicalCheck who spoke to me again before I came in here. They believe that the National Cancer Registry, and I want the Minister to find this out immediately, actually wrote to the Department and told it that there was an issue with regard to the volume of cases compared to CervicalCheck. CervicalCheck would pass on the cases to the National Cancer Registry but the National Cancer Registry could not pass them back. I was told that the National Cancer Registry notified the Department in writing so could the Minister please check it out? I was told it initially took place in 2011 but has happened on numerous occasions since and that CervicalCheck would have orally notified the Department as well regarding this issue. If that is the case and if either of those bodies, particularly the National Cancer Registry, actually notified the Department about this issue, that means that half of the women in Ireland were not audited but the Department knew this beforehand, possibly for years. I said previously in the Dáil that this was either a monumental level of incompetence or a cover up and I went with the first. If it is what I have just described - if the Minister asks those questions and any aspect of that is true - then the latter is true. The Minister should find out whether his Department had any communication with the National Cancer Registry with regard to these cases, which he had to reveal to us as a bombshell last Tuesday, because for me that would be very dangerous territory. I have invited the National Cancer Registry to appear before the Committee of Public Accounts on Thursday along with the Department and the HSE. We have to get to the bottom of what is happening here. We must get to the bottom of the following issues. Why were these women not told in the first place - the 162 and the process by which that happened? Was there knowledge within the Department relating to that one or those two? This is the issue I really need the Minister to check out. Was there information in the Department for some time that the figures in the National Cancer Registry, which were very public, were not being passed on to the CervicalCheck process because of data protection issues and that in reality, people in the Department knew this for years and did not reveal it?

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