COVER-UP CONTINUES..
»»truth is buried six months after scandal exposed »»government is blocking inquiry teams from facts »»Final number of victims will exceed the 221 confirmed »»state still does not know blunder count of each lab
THE Cervicalcheck scandal is still being covered up six months after it was first exposed, it is claimed today.
Cian O’carroll, solicitor for Vicky Phelan and the late Emma Mhic Mhathuna, launched an astonishing attack on the Government’s handling of the fiasco which has resulted in the deaths of 20 women.
He also insists two teams tasked with finding out what went wrong in the labs examining tests have been blocked from uncovering the truth.
Mr O’carroll revealed his other clients had their pre-cancerous cells missed in FOUR consecutive smears.
But despite anomalies, he said bosses at Cervicalcheck ignored the fiasco because: “The truth is painful.”
In an exclusive interview with the Irish Mirror, Mr O’carroll insisted:
■ The State has blocked those tasked with investigating the scandal by limiting their terms of reference
■ The number of victims will rise far beyond the confirmed 221 women
■ They still haven’t asked anyone to go into the labs and probe how the errors occurred, and
■ The State says it still does not have figures for how many mistakes happened in each facility.
The lawyer, 48, said: “I have a number of clients who were missed four times in a row. Those are the situations that make you realise this was very seriously wrong.
“This isn’t me discovering two, or three or four were missed these are documents that were sent to Cervicalcheck years ago telling them two and three and four were missed and they did nothing.
“I don’t see how you can say that isn’t covering it up. Keeping information from people – that’s a cover-up.”
Mr O’carroll, who is based in Cashel, Co Tipperary, is representing many of the victims and their families.
He added: “They’re certainly not getting the answers they want. They didn’t have cancer.
“They got cancer because the opportunity to cure pre-cancer was missed by errors in the lab which were becoming known to Cervicalcheck management who were ignoring it.”
Tragic Ms Mhic Mhathuna, 37, the mum-of-five who died last month, was one of these cases.
Mr O’carroll said: “There were four slides that failed to detect pre-cancerous or invasive cancer at a time when she was believed to have probably invasive cancer because it was very advanced when she was given her diagnosis.
“The earliest slide was in 2010. Cervicalcheck did review that but they kept the result of that audit from the records and that one showed in 2010 that there was a serious error in reading that. It was [read as] normal, but it wasn’t.”
Mr O’carroll slammed the delay in restarting the audit that halted in April when Mrs Phelan’s case came to light. He insisted this is because the number of victims will far exceed 221.
Mr Carroll added: “The reaction of the establishment was, ‘Stop the audit, we don’t want to find out about anymore mistakes’. And it hasn’t been restarted.they say they are trying to work out protocols, the usual garbage. The truth is painful...we don’t want the story to get any worse’.” The solic- itor insisted the audit being undertaken by Cervicalcheck now needs to be widened.
He said: “They fixed months as the period delay between the missed or underreported smear and subsequent diagnosis of cancer, so they said if it was shorter than 18 months that wasn’t a significant period of time to say harm had been caused.
We’ve seen cases where women have suffered very serious harm in five or six months.
“It could be on a threshold of being non-invasive and becoming invasive. Those thresholds are crossed over a period of months, not 18 months.”
Furthermore, health officials have never probed how the errors occurred. A Department of Health official told the Irish Mirror: “It is untrue to say there has been no investigation. In May the Government established two reviews to examine the issues raised in relation to Cervicalcheck. One was the Scoping Inquiry led by Dr Gabriel Scally and one was an independent clinical review led by the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology with expertise from the British Society for Colposcopy and Cytopathology.”
Mr O’carroll blasted this response. He said: “The Scally Report you can deal with very simply. You read the bloody thing and see from the terms of reference that he was not instructed to look at the errors the lab made so all he looks at is the positive results from the lab, the positive predictive values.
“You cannot say the lab is safe if you ignore the errors it is making, which he does. I don’t say he deliberately
I don’t see how you can’t call this a cover-up. Keeping information from people is a cover-up
CIAN O’CARROLL
CO TIPPERARY YESTERDAY