Cervical cancer chief emerges weeks after quitting
As her colleagues face the heat, Dr Flannelly has ‘nothing to say’
FORMER CervicalCheck boss Gráinne Flannelly refused to apologise this week over her mishandling of the false all-clear scandal.
So far, 18 of the women whose cancer was missed have died.
It comes as the senior management team at the screening service – including programme manager John Gleeson – are under increasing pressure to stand aside.
The HSE admitted this week a further 46 women are involved and it told the Irish Mail on Sunday yesterday it did not know if this means there have been more deaths.
Seán Fleming, head of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee, demanded last night that several senior staff at CervicalCheck be deployed to other duties.
This follows Mr Gleeson’s apology for assuming that all the women, who had been given false all-clear results, were informed their test results had been incorrectly read.
It also emerged this week there were delays in providing Dr Gabriel Scally, who is carrying out a scoping inquiry into the scandal, with the documentation he needed.
Dr Scally said he was given hard copy versions of documents which could not be searched or crossreferenced even though the documents were originally created in a digital format.
As her colleagues face the heat, Dr Flannelly was able to enjoy time off at home this week. Speaking at her house – an imposing two-storey end-of-terrace redbrick in the exclusive Dublin 4 seaside enclave of Sandymount, where similar houses fetch around €1m – the cancer specialist said: ‘I don’t really have anything to say at this point.’
Asked whether she was sorry, the consultant gynaecological oncologist said: ‘I have nothing further to say at this point.’
Meanwhile, PAC chair Mr Fleming called on HSE acting director general John Connaghan to move senior CervicalCheck staff to other duties.
‘He could do it today. I want them removed from their CervicalCheck involvement because they’re part of the problem, they’re not part of the solution those senior management team,’ Mr Fleming told RTÉ Radio yesterday.
Dr Flannelly stepped down as clinical director of CervicalCheck in April and disappeared from view for several weeks – leaving others to deal with the aftermath of her decisions to downplay the communication of the false all clears to the now 255 women.
‘That management are not part of the solution’