Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I join with the Deputy in thanking Dr. Scally and his team for the work they have done in the past couple of years. We were very lucky as a country that we found him. He has done some really good work to help us improve the CervicalCheck programme. I am very grateful to him and his team for that.

The Coombe lab is being developed at the moment. We are keen to have it up and running and commissioned as soon as possible so that we can have many more, if not the vast majority of smear tests examined in Ireland rather than abroad. As Dr. Scally pointed out, it is a good idea to have more than one lab for many obvious reasons, both in terms of redundancy and also comparing results from different labs. He did point out that the labs currently being used, such as Quest, are very high quality. His previous report pointed out that the labs used abroad were very much up to international standard.

See this speech in context