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

I am sharing time with Deputy Coppinger. Like others, I warmly welcome the 221 Plus group and their families to the Gallery today and we should all be extremely proud of the calibre of women in this country and the courage they have had in fighting this terrible battle and tragedy.

One cannot help but notice there was a familiar ring to the apology although it was heartfelt from the Taoiseach and the Ministers involved. It is, once again, an apology to the women of this country whose lives have been unutterably altered by the actions and inactions of this State. While I am happy for the 221 Plus group, their families and the many others outside these Houses who are receiving this apology, I question what it actually means and the lessons and changes in policy that led to this tragedy.

I want to start by making what seems an obligatory statement, particularly for a woman in this Chamber. I support the screening programme fully. As a woman, I want to emphasise the importance of not undermining the national CervicalCheck screening programme. I support the programme and know too well that it is vital for women but I will not take lectures or mansplaining from Ministers or officials who try to patiently explain to me the difference between a screening service and a diagnostic service, that screening services have limitations and all of them have statistically proven numbers of misread or false negative slides among the reads. I know that, as do the women here and many of the women in Ireland. We also know all too well that we must question what today's apology is for. It is for treatment and non-disclosure, which is good but the apology would sit better with all of us in this country if we did not know that, in the near future, the Taoiseach, his Cabinet and the State will take the finest legal minds to a courtroom to argue against Ruth Morrissey in an effort to have a decision overturned that this State ultimately bears responsibility for the catastrophic errors in the laboratories in her case. The State is responsible.

Today's apology should be for the decision taken in 2008 by the then Government, and reiterated by Ministers of Health since, including the now Senator Reilly, the now Taoiseach and the current Minister, Deputy Harris, to continue the outsourcing and privatisation of the screening service. The State was responsible when it did not check whether the laboratories to which it contracted out the services were ISO accredited. The State was responsible when it made cheaper costs the chief criteria in awarding contracts to those outside laboratories and when it did not bother checking the condition and volume of work of screeners in the laboratories to which the service had been contracted. It is incredible that, to this day, the State has failed to investigate what happened in those laboratories when catastrophic errors were made in reading the slides.

For two years, I have asked for a breakdown of the laboratories involved in the misread slides and have been told it is complex, not straightforward, and a breakdown of these misread slides from the laboratories would not capture the full nuance of the issue. I have been told that the laboratories' standards and practices were beyond reproach. We have been told repeatedly by the Minister and the HSE that there is nothing to see, that all laboratories make errors and the errors that were made were statistically in line with what might be expected. Professor Scally was and is invoked to confirm that standards and practices in private laboratories are not the issue. Why, then, is the Taoiseach so assured by the good Professor Scally when the State specifically required him not to look at the medical records or slides of the 221 women? The Scally report never looked at the errors that have so far left 22 women dead with, sadly, more to follow. Scientists have been paraded out to confirm that we just do not understand the complexities and limitations of the screening but we now have the laboratory audit of the 221 women and 354 slides. We can now have some light thrown on these narratives. What does these statistics and figures show? One public laboratory, with cytologists and technicians trained here in Ireland to standards over which we had oversight, which were publicly funded and run not for profit, had an error rate of misread slides that was statistically a fraction of that found in Quest Diagnostics and CPL. The error rate for Quest in Illinois was five times that of the Coombe. The error rate for Quest in Teterboro was three times that of the Coombe. The error rate for CPL in Texas was seven times that of the Coombe and even the error rate for CPL in Dublin was five times that of the Coombe. It is incredible to say that, in every abattoir and meat factory in this country, an inspector sits there full time to oversee as cattle are slaughtered and meat is rendered to ensure that standards in end products are adhered to.

But for almost ten years we contracted out work to private laboratories because they were cheaper than our own public service and we did not think to monitor or have oversight of the quality and standard of the work.

I would hugely welcome this apology, and it would sit better, if the Government would cease to pursue Ruth Morrissey and reopen the audit for all women. My secretary's best friend is currently privately paying for an audit of her slides because she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her community in Lucan is fundraising so she can pay that. There is a huge limitation to what has gone on and ending the review has unfortunately not stopped the addition of more cases of women who will face this trauma in the months and years to come. I welcome the apology, as I will welcome the next apology from the next Taoiseach or Minister when they finally apologise for the outsourcing of the service, which has dearly cost lives and created tremendous pain for thousands of families throughout the country.

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