Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Sinn Féin motion and support its calls for transparency and openness. It is telling that when such calls were explicitly removed from previous Bills by the Government, there was obviously something to hide. Welcome as all of that is, I do not believe it gets to the nub of our problem. I will continue to emphasise that there is an ideological decision at the core of this problem, namely, the decision to outsource health services and to privatise them. It was a decision taken by the Fianna Fáil-Green and Mary Harney Government back in the day. The justification then and now to do this was that our system had limited capacity but also the private system is much more efficient and reliable than a public system based on publicly funded hospitals with clear oversight and accountability. When warned in 2008 that in ten years’ time that this would lead to major health issues for women, it fell on deaf ears. When Senator James Reilly became Minister for Health, he completely forgot the furore he created about outsourcing when he was in opposition. That was neatly followed by the next health Minister, not the Taoiseach, and then by the current Minister, Deputy Harris.

We need to question the whole creeping poison of outsourcing and privatisation of health services. We will see it in other services as well, causing major problems for people and major political decisions which are justified by the market. They say it is great to have competition as it brings down prices and makes more efficiency. It actually does not. It creates dangerous situations for women's health and lives. From the data the national cervical screening programme compiles, we can find out quickly and succinctly the rates of detection. This will allow us to compare the misdiagnosis rates coming from labs contracted by the Fianna Fáil-Green Government to rates from the not-for-profit public system before 2008. I have repeatedly asked the Minister's office for answers to questions that I do not believe are rocket science.

For example, can we see a list of the labs which dealt with the results of the 209 women who were misdiagnosed? We were initially told they would be called lab A, B and C. We are then told they would be named. I still cannot get that information. As late as today in meetings with departmental officials, they said it depends on how the information is got. We just want the information, not the process as to how it is got.

The urgency is simple. If we find that outsourcing is the cause, that means that responsibility lies with Mary Harney as health Minister under the Fianna Fáil-Green Government, then with the Fine Gael-Labour Government and then the current Government. If outsourcing is the problem, then the call by the Medical Laboratory Scientists Association to repatriate the service without any further delay and put it in the hands of the publicly funded health service and not-for-profit needs to go out. Otherwise, we are playing around and messing with women's health. Like how we outsource terminations to Britain, we are outsourcing cervical tests to the United States. It is not good enough and has to end. Women's lives matter. That is what this whole sad debacle proves.

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