Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise the issue of CervicalCheck again. I am getting really frustrated with the Government's stonewalling of my questions. The CervicalCheck scandal broke in 2018. It involved among other things smear test slides that were misread. Women sued and received apologies and payments. The Taoiseach issued a State apology. The courts and the Government have conceded that these women were wronged and the slides were misread. However, when the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists review was announced by the Minister in light of the scandal, the terms of reference provided by the Department were such that only slides of women who had since been diagnosed with cancer were re-examined to see whether there were mistakes in them.

The problem is that countless slides were skipped over and left on the shelf because they belonged to women who did not have a diagnosis of cancer at that stage. At the time of the review, some of these women had cancer or pre-cancerous or abnormal cells but they did not know they were ill. As such they were excluded from the review. Some of these women have since been diagnosed and the slides, which date to before the scandal, have been examined. The courts have ruled that those historic slides contain abnormalities. Is it true to say that had their slides been included in the review in 2018 they would have been diagnosed earlier and their lives could have been saved?

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