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

With regard to what Deputy Jim O'Callaghan said earlier, I agree we should make some effort to make people more aware of the principles that have been set out by the Attorney General and agreed by the Government. This is being disseminated among Government bodies and agencies. There are plans for seminars. Perhaps this needs to be done more widely.

The State certainly does not always get it right in its litigation strategies. It loses cases from time to time. I agree that the perception of the State being an aggressive litigant is not entirely fair and I will give two examples. I will not go into the details of the cases. One that I am aware of is a medical case where the plaintiff settled for 25% of the original claim. This was presented by them and in the media as a total victory by the plaintiff against an unkind State which dragged them through the courts and strung it out and only at the end gave in. This is not what happened at all. The amount could have been settled for years previously. Questions are never asked by broadcasters or journalists as to how much the claim was, how much people looked for and how much they settled for in the end. I do not know why these questions are never asked.

I know of another case that had two aspects. The plaintiff won on one aspect and the State won on the other. Yet it was presented as a total victory and vindication on behalf of the plaintiff. Of course that is not what happened at all. The plaintiff won half the case and lost the other half. Again it was perceived that the State dragged this person into court, fought them all the way and lost. This is not what happened. There is a failure on behalf of journalists to dig into the cases properly and ask the hard questions that are not asked. We often see the solicitor for the plaintiff making a statement on the steps but we never see the solicitor for the State doing this. For whatever reason, the State does not stand over its position or the reason it took the position it did.

I am not aware of the finding mentioned by Deputy Murphy. I probably should be, so I will get briefed on it. Perhaps it was only in the past few days. Certainly if the Department of Health broke any rules, regulations or laws, I cannot stand over it. We need to make sure it does not happen again.

Deputy Tóibín asked very specific questions about CervicalCheck. I cannot answer them here. I will ask the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, to come back to him directly or I will do so myself. One thing I will draw attention to is the World Health Organization's report that came out recently which demonstrated the extent to which Ireland is now an outlier when it comes to how the courts and our justice system treat screening. Screening, as we have always said, is not a diagnostic test although we never really explain what this means. The whole point of screening is that it cannot be relied upon to diagnose cancer. The whole point of screening is that we take a large number of healthy people. Let us say we want to check people for their blood pressure. In that case we would take a large bunch of healthy people with no symptoms-----

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