David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the publication of the Scally report. There is universal acceptance that Dr. Scally has done a good job in the timeframe given to him and with the terms of reference that governed his work. He admits that he was unable to establish the full facts and the truth in many areas because of a lack of time, access to information and so on. An awful lot more work needs to be done to establish the full facts and the truth. If that means a commission of investigation, that should happen. Let there be no doubt about that.

What Dr. Scally uncovered has raised serious questions about the Department of Health, the HSE and CervicalCheck with regard to systems, practices and procedure failures. We know from the report that one of the company laboratories, CPL, outsourced part of its work to four laboratories that were not accredited or certified to the standards demanded by CervicalCheck. The problem is that Dr. Scally says in his report that CervicalCheck knew of that, yet did not take the appropriate action. Dr. Scally asks a number of questions on page 56 of his report. He asks what volume of CervicalCheck tests was performed in each of these four laboratories, what their compliance with quality and standards was, if CPL informed CervicalCheck of workload being transferred to other sites and whether such transfers were approved. He asks questions that he cannot answer in his report. It is incredible that that is the case. On outsourcing of contracts, there were questions about rolling over of tenders and procurement which I am sure the Committee of Public Accounts will examine.

Dr. Scally was damning about the non-disclosure issue. That is important because we cannot explain all of this away as simple systems failures. Some of this happened by design with individuals taking decisions to withhold information from women. I am not about witch-hunts or looking for people's heads for the sake of it but surely people must be held to account for this. We have had this far too often and seen it in many areas, not just health but across the public service. When failures occur, the wagons are circled and they are explained away as simple systems failures when individuals made very bad decisions and need to be held to account. One way to do that is through a commission of investigation. I hope the Minister will be able to say that it is still on the table and something the Government could and will support.

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