Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

He is now because people are screaming for him to turn up but we were informed earlier today that he was not going to turn up.

As a result of a question I asked today in the exchange with the State Claims Agency we finally revealed something that we could not drag out of the Minister, the Taoiseach or the HSE for the past week. I asked if there was a difference between the accuracy and the quality of the screening that we got because of the outsourcing to US companies. We could not get the information or the detail. Then I asked a question today and it only occurred to me today. Nobody else had asked the question, which is a simple question to a representative of the State Claims Agency. Were the ten outstanding legal cases only taken against the US companies? He revealed that it was only against US labs. No cases were taken against the Coombe. Cases were taken only against outsourced, privatised US labs. That tells us something. That tells us that the outsourcing was the problem.

Why is it only them? We certainly know that the outsourcing cost us in terms of public health and transparency because the State Claims Agency stated that under no circumstances would it try to gag anybody. It was CPL that tried to gag people because profit came first for CPL. That meant trying to shut Vicky Phelan up. If it had succeeded in shutting Vicky Phelan up - thankfully for her bravery it did not - what would the consequences have been? This would not have come out and we would not have forced the crisis which now means we might address the issue and get to the bottom of what the hell was going on.

The representatives of the State Claims Agency told us today that if it had been in-house, it would never have been an issue; they would never have tried to gag anybody. However, a private for-profit company wants to gag people because it might impact on its profits. While I am not saying we should not have a scoping exercise, I am saying we do not need it to draw a simple conclusion: we should stop outsourcing to US labs which try to gag people and are the only ones against which claims are now being made. Why are no claims being made against the Coombe? It is because the Coombe had a better detection rate than these private companies. The outsourcing was the problem.

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