Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to start by acknowledging the bravery and perseverance of many women and their families who have been willing to speak publicly and fight publicly for justice, women such as Ruth Morrissey, Emma Mhic Mhathúna, Vicky Phelan and men like Stephen Teap. It is not easy to take on the State or companies with deep pockets, to walk into court with one's barrister and be faced with an army of junior and senior counsel paid for by companies and the State, or to experience the State using the law like a battering ram, deploying vast legal resources which few individual citizens could ever match. It is not easy to have the most personal and intimate details of one's life thrown around in a court room or having well-heeled barristers delving into one's sex life in an attempt to paint a picture for the court that somehow it is one's own fault that one has cervical cancer and that the slides were missed.

It is not easy at the best of times for someone in her full health and it must be next to impossible for a woman fighting this disease or recovering from it to go through all of this and deal with all of it, yet that is what these women have done. They have fought, persevered and suffered the slings and arrows of our legal system. This is why we are here this evening setting up this tribunal because without them this would not have happened.

To an extent, the CervicalCheck tribunal will be a step into the unknown. Nothing of its kind has ever been done by the State. Fianna Fáil believes several changes are needed to the Bill to provide additional protections for women and their families. We believe the legislation should have been before the House a long time ago. We believe the results for those involved could be mixed. There could be unintended consequences of this on the basis it has never been done before. However, in the round we believe this is a genuine attempt to make the process less hostile and a little more manageable for the women and their families. We believe the Government is engaging in good faith and we believe it is supported by the women, or certainly most of the women. As such, we will support the Bill.

More than a year ago, the Taoiseach pledged that the State would be on the side of the plaintiff and on the side of the woman. Given that, and given the time sensitive nature of this issue for people involved, the Bill should have been before the House last year. It is extraordinary that it is over a year since the Taoiseach said this. He also said that no woman would ever have to go to court again. That was over a year ago but, of course, we know that many women had to go to court and had to go to court repeatedly. He also promised that the State would make good on the payments to the women and that the State would pursue the laboratories if necessary. None of these things has happened. There was an awful lot of loose talk and promises made in the heat of what unfolded but most of those promises were either never met or took far too long to come about, including this initiative. It is hard not to conclude that much of the recent progress has not been spurred on to some extent by media attention. Perhaps it is not the case but if it is then women such as Ruth Morrissey deserve credit, as do the media for continuing to shine a light on this and continuing to keep it in the public domain. If that is what has happened, it would be similar to how this entire episode started last year. Civil servants warned the Government weeks in advance of Vicky Phelan's case ending that this would be a problem that could undermine confidence in the screening programme but the Government did nothing.

In recent days, I received a response to a parliamentary question on when the Government engaged with the national screening services for the first time. The answer was the morning after Vicky Phelan was on the news for the first time. That is what happened. It cannot be the case that the Government acts like this, that it is warned about serious things but does nothing and then, when something comes up on the six o'clock news that it has known about and been warned about for weeks, it states that now it will act, now that it is a public crisis. This is where we are and it is certainly better late than never.

Women need and deserve an alternative to the public adversarial court process that has gone on. Of course, it is important that if they choose to continue to access the courts and go through the process in public that is their right but they have this other option. The tribunal does offer a private space where women can discuss what happened and make their case. It is an important option to have. There are three changes we seek to the tribunal itself and we will table Committee Stage amendments. I appreciate they may not be taken for technical legal reasons but I very much would like the Minister of State to take them on board and see whether the Minister can come up his own versions that have been checked through the Attorney General's office. I know time is short but I want to lay them out now rather than just waiting for Committee Stage.

The first change is with regard to who has access. At present, the two groups of women who have access are the 221+ group who have been through the CervicalCheck audit and, of the other group of approximately 2,000 women who have also been diagnosed with cervical cancer, the approximately 1,000 who have gone through the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, RCOG, review. This means approximately 1,000 women who have or had cervical cancer and who are on the national cancer database but who said they did not want to go through the audit by RCOG do not have access. When they said they did not want to take up the RCOG review, they did not know that in refusing to go through it they were also taking themselves outside of the option of being able to use the tribunal. This does not seem right. We want all of the 2,000 women on the national cancer database to be re-approached, made the offer again and told we want them to have access to the tribunal and that if they would like to go through the RCOG process we will add them to the process so it can happen. It would not be right for these women to be told they cannot have access to the tribunal because they said they did not want to go through the process, when at the time no one said they would not have access to the tribunal. This is the first change we would very much like the Government to incorporate.

The second change is with regard to costs. Obviously, the tribunal will not be free, and going to court is not free. The women and their families will need the right highly expert and specialised legal representation. Solicitors, barristers and the lot can be very expensive. It can be beyond most people anyway. In this case, we are dealing with people who are also dealing with the financial implications of fighting cancer so there may be a loss of household income because people have had to take time off work. There may be an awful lot of expenses related to their healthcare and many of them are already in a stressed financial situation. I hope the Government will agree there can be no woman and no family who, for financial reasons, does not get access to the appropriate level of legal representation and expertise. We would like this hardwired into the legislation. I am very open to how it is done. Perhaps it could be done through free legal aid but not just random free legal aid from whoever happens to be available. It should be the right legal aid. Perhaps it would be made available to everybody or done on a means test. Certainly, we will table an amendment to look at this. The point is that financial concerns can never be a barrier to full access and full legal representation.

The third concerns hostile cross-examination. The genesis of this tribunal was to address somehow the extraordinary hostility that women were dealing with, including some nasty stuff such as victim shaming and bringing up women's sex life in court. All sorts of nasty stuff was going on. The idea of the tribunal is to protect women from this. The tribunal protects them from the public glare but there will still be full hostile cross-examination. We will submit an amendment, and we are very open to the Government's ideas on this, to try to provide additional protection for the women involved, for example, that it would be hardwired into the legislation that rulings can be made on aggravated damages if those cross-examining the women go to far. We know we have to get the balance right and we need the laboratories to partake in this.

These are the three areas and I am happy to discuss them with the Minister of State, the Minister or the officials prior to Committee Stage. I would very much like the Government to submit amendments on these three issues, which it can accept on Committee Stage.

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