Dáil debates

Tuesday, 8 September 2020

Gnó Comhaltaí Príobháideacha - Private Members' Business - Cancer Screening: Motion [Private Members]

 

8:50 pm

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

On behalf of Solidarity-People Before Profit, I welcome the Sinn Féin motion and give it our full support. I want to ask the Minister why, given the experience he had in opposition, he needs to amend the motion so significantly. Had he been sitting on the Opposition benches he probably would have agreed with every word of the motion rather than amending it in the way he proposed. Perhaps he could address that when he returns to the House.

The motion is important for all of the reasons other Deputies have said and which I will not repeat. There is another reason the kind of approaches we need at this point in the Covid crisis are absolutely vital. It is because we are facing into a period where a tug-of-war is taking place between the absolute need to protect public health and the need to return to economic activity. It is extraordinary that we have seen more emphasis put on the reopening of pubs, which I am not opposed toper se, than on the reopening of our health services to the degree that we need them to be reopened.

This motion is important because there is a vacuum in our society which represents the frustration of tens of thousands of people who are anxious about the continued lockdown and restrictions of Covid-19, and are also vulnerable to the anti-science logic that is being put about by many organised groups throughout Irish society. There is anti-science logic that says that the Government is over egging the pudding, that there is no danger, that people are not dying from this disease and that we should not mask up or socially distance. There is also a campaign in schools whereby legal letters are being sent to principals and teachers warning them not to take children out of a class if they have a temperature.

These are dangerous times for ordinary people whose ideas, frustration and values may be vulnerable to this kind of exploitation. It is thoroughly and absolutely anti-science. Not only is it anti-science, it is anti-worker and, specifically, anti-health worker. Not to mask up and take precautions on public health grounds is very dangerous.

Although the motion does not necessarily address that, it helps to shift the emphasis of the political class to where it should be. How are we going to address the balance and tension between our economic survival and health services? This motion goes a long way towards pulling towards the latter, which is necessary.

It is vital that we protect ourselves and, particularly, our health workers. It is also vital that we signal to the population that they are not going to be neglected if they need a mammogram. I am of an age where I know many women whose mammograms have been cancelled. They are worried sick that, in the long run, this may endanger their lives because, as has been said over and over during this debate, cancer can be life threatening and life taking. The same is true of CervicalCheck, bowel screening, etc. The thrust of the motion is to insist that we begin to find ways to return to full, normal and proper screening services.

The denial of screening services is dangerous for women, in particular, but we also know that women have been put through significant danger because of our approach to healthcare, including outsourcing some of the best services we could have given them such as CervicalCheck and other types of screening. That outsourcing has led to the tragedies we have seen involving the 221+ women, some of whom have become household names and whose faces we all know from our screens because they have experienced the tragedy of being victims of a service that let them down.

To that end, I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about the CervicalCheck scandal because it is not over. It was stated earlier that legislation needs to be put in place to deal with this. Next Tuesday, women who belong to the 221+ group will be outside the gates of this House to protest. I hope the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, who has left the Chamber, will go out to meet them because when he was an Opposition Deputy he met women who protested in this manner.

I know of a very tragic case where a family is still being brought through the courts. That has to end. The State cannot treat women in this way. As has been said, do we not think that the legacy of Ruth Morrissey matters? Do we not see the necessity to undo the harm that was done by the cervical screening scandal? We need a faster turnaround of services once they are reinstated, which implies that we need more investment. We also need more trained staff and, ultimately, we need clinicians and technicians trained in our very fine colleges who can do the job at home. We should never again rely on sending our services out of this country. Full repatriation of all screening services is required.

The kind of protests that we are seeing on our streets, where people insist they will not wear masks or socially distance, is not acceptable because it is anti-worker. This Saturday, I will be on the streets with a small group of socially distanced, fully masked up protesters to say that very thing, namely, that to be anti-mask is to be anti-health worker. We have to put an end to that sort of rhetoric, which is why the positive nature of this motion is important in the midst of this pandemic. I fully support Sinn Féin for putting it forward.

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