Lisa Chambers (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In the two and half years I have been in this House we have spent quite a lot of time discussing female gynaecological issues. I believe that the women of this State are fed up with the failures of our health system to serve their interests and needs. When this scandal broke there was widespread fear and panic across the country. Every woman who had been through the screening progress woke up that day wondering if her tests were okay and if she was okay. I rang the helpline but it was most unhelpful. The person to whom I spoke did not offer me any sort of consolation or direction. By the time I got through, I felt quite frustrated with the process.

It seems that our labs and our screening process are okay and up to good standards. What is not okay is that while going through the screening process, it is not clear that when one receives a result, it may not be accurate. We need to work on that. There was an adversarial approach taken towards women who went through this process. It is frightening to think that we almost did not know about this issue. We came very close to never learning about the withholding of information from these women and the difficulties in our processes.

We now need to restore confidence rapidly in the screening programme. The Minister's response at the outset was lacking. It was not a rapid or adequate response and it allowed the problem to get worse. The screening programme saves lives so we need to restore confidence in it. We need to educate people properly about what a screening programme entails and that if a woman has symptoms in between her smear tests, she must go to her GP. A woman may have received a result that said she was fine, and she thought she was fine, but may have ignored possible symptoms. We have to learn from this to ensure it does not happen again.

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