Screening scandal: Who is to blame?

The Taoiseach yesterday announced there will be an independent inquiry into the CervicalCheck controversy.

It will be conducted by the Health Information and Quality Authority and will have statutory powers, for compelling people and documents.

The announcement by Leo Varadkar was deeply unsurprising. Since the story broke, the scandal has been growing.

At its heart is the failure of the State’s national cervical programme to inform women they were given false negatives on their smear tests (and in some instances false positives).

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Screening scandal has makings of major political crisis

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By yesterday the numbers were in the hundreds. Also it emerged yesterday that 17 of those women had died, but the cause of death for each has yet to be disclosed.

The gist of the scandal, as Martin Wall's lead story describes it, is 208 women diagnosed with cervical cancer should have received earlier intervention. "In total, 162 of these women, 17 of whom are now dead, were not notified of the outcome of the audits."

In his analysis piece Wall also writes: "Given that the HSE has had a national policy on open disclosure in place since 2013, the fact that 165 women were not given details of the findings of audits of their cases is staggering."

The beginnings of this scandal go back more than a decade when the HSE decided to outsource screenings from laboratories in Ireland to the United States.

The argument at the time was there was an urgent need for a national screening programme that was capable of delivering results quickly to women. The Irish service did not have the resources, neither in terms of capacity nor in terms of speed.

There were warnings at the time there were divergences between the approach and methodology used in the United States and Ireland - and that these would result in false results.

On the other hand, Tony O’Brien (now the head of the HSE, then the senior official behind the outsourcing) strongly defended the change, saying it had saved many lives.

The director of the service has already resigned after Minister for Health Simon Harris said he did not have confidence in the management.

Harris, the current Minister, and Varadkar, his predecessor, will not get a free pass on this from Opposition TDs who will focus many of their questions on the actions or decisions of each in relation to the service.

In particular, Harris will be asked about a briefing note he received on the case as recently as April 16th.

As Wall reports this morning, there also seems to be a breach between Harris and O’Brien.

Very pointedly, O’Brien defended Prof Gráinne Flannelly yesterday and directly criticised Harris by saying he himself would not have gone on the Six-One News to express a lack of confidence in the management as Harris did last week.

News from a Border town

Unlike his British counterpart, David Davis, the EU’s top negotiator on Brexit, Michel Barnier, made a meaningful visit to the Border yesterday - not just a cursory visit that lasted just long enough for the cameras to click.

Barnier’s visit to Dundalk yesterday, where he and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar participated in a seminar on Brexit, gave a neat illustration of the priority of the Border question for the EU, and, by corollary, for Britain.

As Simon Carswell reports, Barnier said there is a “real risk” the EU and UK will fail to agree a deal on Brexit without a solution to avoid a hard border in Ireland.

That raises the possibility of a failure to reach a deal and would mean the worst of all outcomes.

“There is a real risk; we have to be prepared for all options including no deal,” Mr Barnier told the All-Island Civic Forum on Brexit.

The Government’s supposed ace up the sleeve is the ‘backstop’ agreed last December that purports to leave the Border situation as is in the event of a deal.

But it has been clear for months this will not be acceptable to the UK government or to the DUP, which is currently propping up Theresa May’s government.

There were noises from the DUP claiming Barnier took no cognisance of unionist concerns and that yesterday’s visit to the Border was disrespectful.

As the October deadline looms closer, there is a very real prospect the Border issue, which has loomed large in Irish politics since independence, might now be a dominant theme in wider European and British politics for quite some time to come.