Victory for Vicky as RTÉ cuts out Holohan cervical cancer comments from programme
RTÉ has removed comments made by Dr Tony Holohan about the CervicalCheck scandal from an initial edit of the Meaning of Life to be screened tonight.
It comes after the solicitor, who represented Vicky Phelan and other women affected by the controversy, complained to the station after he was shown the first edit of the programme by the Irish Mail on Sunday.
Cian O’Carroll described the comments by the former chief medical officer as ‘gross untruths’.
Mr O’Carroll had asked RTÉ to either pull the programme or at least include a message ‘which would inform viewers that these were alternative facts’, spoken by Dr Holohan in the interview.
And RTÉ confirmed last night that it had made ‘further changes to the programme ahead of transmission’ in response to the solicitor’s demand.
The broadcaster last night reissued an embargoed link to the edited show to recipients of an original preview link.
‘Please note additional small edits have been made to the preview copy supplied earlier this week for editorial reasons,’ a spokewoman explained.
But a source confirmed to MOS that Dr Holohan’s comments on CervicalCheck had been removed from the broadcast.
Mr O’Carroll had taken exception to a segment of the interview in which Dr Holohan questions the public’s understanding of ‘what actually happened and didn’t happen’ in the cervical smear test debacle – in which more than 200 women developed cancer after having received incorrect results from the Government’s free cervical screening programme.
‘There was no delayed diagnosis, there was no misdiagnosis,’ Dr Holohan said in the first version of an interview, conducted by Joe Duffy.
‘There is a view abroad now, which has largely been reinforced by parts of the legal profession, that a difference in opinion – which is all we’re talking about – between two [smear test] readers at two different points in time constitutes medical negligence, which it doesn’t,’ he said.
But Mr O’Carroll told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘To come out as the national broadcaster and as somebody in a key position like that, to allow [Dr Holohan] a forum, which has been edited, whereby that person asserts that nobody has been harmed; that nobody has received a cancer or developed a cancer that they ought not to have; that there has been no negligence in the system – those are gross untruths and have been established to be so by the appropriate authorities, who are the courts.’
He said it was ‘not my own opinion’, pointing to High Court and Supreme Court rulings in favour of women affected, including Ruth Morrissey, a CervicalCheck campaigner who died in 2020.
Shortly before her death, the Supreme Court overturned a Health Service Executive (HSE) appeal against an earlier High Court ruling in Ms Morrissey’s favour, over its failure to tell her of the results of audits of her smear tests.
The Supreme Court required the HSE – and co-defendants Quest Diagnostics Incorporated and Medlab Pathology Limited – to pay more than €2.1m to Ms Morrissey.
In his letter of complaint to RTÉ, Mr O’Carroll said he was writing ‘on behalf of many of the women affected including many of the more than 30 women who have died to date and the hundreds who have undergone life-changing treatments from cancers that they ought not to have developed’.
The solicitor wrote: ‘In many of the hundreds of cases taken to date against CervicalCheck and the private laboratories to which it outsourced the reading and interpretation of those smears, negligence causing death and truly horrific injuries has been admitted. In many more cases, that negligence was effectively conceded through the payment of massive damages that no private company would ever contemplate unless it knew it bore a clear responsibility for the harm caused.
‘If Dr Holohan wishes to acknowledge that the courts have decided there was negligence, but he disputes that, then it is a matter of opinion but for him to state as a matter of fact that there was no negligence is a very serious misrepresentation of the truth and ought not be given the platform of your programme.’
The letter went on to state that there are ‘other aspects of the interview that are misleading or hurtful to the many victims of CervicalCheck’, but Mr O’Carroll said he was ‘attempting to focus my concerns here on the manifest untruths of [Dr Holohan’s] statement’.
The solicitor quoted Dr Gabriel Scally’s 2022 official review into the scandal, in which he said: ‘It is, in my view, entirely reprehensible to claim that, in the past, CervicalCheck was as good as any other cervical screening programme in the world. If you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge past failings, why would anyone trust you today?’
Mr O’Carroll said Dr Holohan is ‘being emboldened by the fact that nobody is checking what he is saying’.
‘And he has been given numerous fora at this stage. Obviously, he wrote his own book and that’s his own matter. But he’s had outing after outing now in the media and each time he seems to be getting bolder in his statements.’
Three weeks ago, Mr O’Carroll responded to claims made by Dr Holohan relating to the CervicalCheck controversy in his new autobiography, telling the MoS the book was ‘just the latest example of this self-serving revisionism’.
In his book We Need To Talk – which was launched last month by former RTÉ broadcaster Ryan Tubridy – Dr Holohan claimed not disclosing the results of a look-back audit was at the heart of the scandal.
But Mr O’Carroll sharply contradicted Dr Holohan’s version of events.
In a statement provided to the MoS, RTÉ confirmed the programme ‘made further changes’ to the programme.
The statement said: ‘The Meaning of Life is ‘not a current affairs programme and its one-to-one format does not always allow contrary opinions to be aired. However, where matters of public controversy are discussed on any programme, RTÉ has a statutory requirement to provide balance.
‘There are strongly held opinions and huge sensitivities around this issue and a format such as this is, which has a moral and spiritual focus, is not always the best place to tease out the nuance of arguments on either side. On balance, we have therefore decided to make further changes to the programme ahead of transmission.’
The MoS attempted to reach Dr Holohan through RTÉ. A spokesperson initially agreed to forward our query before saying they did not have a contact for him at 6pm yesterday.
The MoS also contacted the publicist and publishing director for his book, but they failed to provide a contact or pass on our queries to Dr Holohan.
‘Inform viewers these are alternative facts ’
‘Nobody is checking what he is saying’