Dáil debates

Wednesday, 21 November 2018

Saincheisteanna Tráthúla - Topical Issue Debate

Cancer Screening Programmes

2:30 pm

Photo of Stephen DonnellyStephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have great respect for the Minister of State, Deputy Jim Daly, and my comments are not a personal criticism of him. In deputising for the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, the Minister of State has been consigned to reading out what is written on a piece of paper. This is topical issues and is meant to be a Dáil debate. The Minister for Health could have emailed me this response. I learned how to read ages ago. It is not fair to the Minister of State. It is certainly not fair to this woman that in parliamentary debate someone deputises for the Minister for Health and does not answer my questions. It is not the Minister of State's fault because the answers are not contained in the prepared response. I am not criticising the Minister of State but this is not satisfactory. The response given is not what Parliament is for; it is what email is for. I am going to ask the questions again. If the Minister of State cannot answer them now, so be it. The questions I am asking are important and relevant and I ask the Minister of State to answer them if he can. If he cannot answer them then I ask that the Minister for Health comes to the House to answer them. That is what this Parliament is meant to be about.

Will the Department instruct the HSE to release the report? It is my understanding that the woman's solicitor has requested a copy of the report on numerous occasions but has not received it yet. If that is true, then the HSE is leaving itself open to allegations of a cover up. It cannot be tolerated. A report was commissioned that made very serious findings, with 56 actions and 20 recommendations identified. I am sure the Minister of State will agree with me that it is not okay for the HSE to hide and to say that recommendations were made, it has implemented a bunch of them and that we should just go away. Will the Minister of State instruct the HSE to release the report? Will he also ask for a much more detailed response from the HSE on the recommendations and actions that have been implemented. We are talking here about life and death and in the context of everything that has happened this year in terms of failures of audit and testing, this is very serious. The Minister of State may not be able to answer me now but I ask him to report back on whether the technology, training and skills within the diagnostics team are the very best available. Has the team had the required capital investment, continuous professional development and so on and does it have everything it needs to do the very best job possible? Finally, I would like to see an audit done of other potential misses. It is my fervent hope that this is a one-off, isolated tragedy but given what we have seen in other areas of the country, I would like to see the HSE or another appropriate body ascertain whether this is a one-off incident. Is there potentially a cluster of misses here and if so, are they due to failures of technology, failures of governance or something else?

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