Additional reporting by Vivienne Clarke.
The chief medical officer has said he has a “huge amount of regret” over what happened to the women affected by the CervicalCheck screening controversy.
Dr Tony Holohan also said he has “enormous sympathy” for women because a basic commitment was not honoured.
He described the failure to inform the women of the clinical audit of their screening as “wrong” and that it “simply should not have happened”.
On Wednesday, Lynsey Bennett, a 32-year-old mother-of-two who is seriously ill with cervical cancer settled a High Court action over alleged misinterpretation of cervical smears.
There was settlement but no admission of liability. A letter of regret was read out in the court from the head of the CervicalCheck national screening programme but there was no apology.
It is two years since the controversy came to light after mother-of-two Vicky Phelan brought a case before the courts.
Asked at the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) briefing on Thursday whether he wanted to apologise to the women affected by the issue, Dr Holohan said: “I have a huge amount of regret to what’s happened to women in those situations.
“[I have] enormous sympathy for the women concerned because it was a basic commitment to women that wasn’t honoured,” he added.
“Each woman in that situation believed and had every reason to believe that this information would be shared.
“It wasn’t shared so the failure, which was at the centre of the CervicalCheck, the failure to feed back the information that was gleaned from retrospective clinical audit was something that simply shouldn’t have happened.”
Dr Holohan also said: “A very significant harm has been done to people who have had the experience over the course of the last number of years.
“The harm at the centre of cervical check was that there was no disclosure to women of the findings of a retrospective clinical audit of their care.
“Where there was a commitment to give that commitment back to individuals the information wasn’t in fact given to those individuals.
“There was significant hurt for those individuals.”
He said the controversy was investigated in detail and the Cervical Check programme was found to have “met the quality standards” but there were findings of “substantial wrong about the failure to share info with women”.
“A lot of learning has been gleaned from those experiences and is now been applied into the ongoing operation of the programme,” he added.
Clinicians
Following the CMO's comments on Thursday, Dr Gabriel Scally, who led the inquiry into the CervicalCheck screening programme, has said the clinicians involved should apologise directly to the woman impacted by the controversy.
Speaking on Newstalk’s Pat Kenny show, Dr Scally said the women deserved direct apologies after they were not informed about issues with their smear tests and many went on to develop cervical cancer.
"In all of my dealings with the women involved, what they particularly objected to, was that when there was a decision to tell the women about their slides, they were not told properly. They were told, in many ways, in a disgraceful way and dealt with very badly by their clinicians."
Dr Scally added that the women affected by the scandal needed three things to happen before they could be content.
"One is that someone has to tell them the truth and that is a real problem in the CervicalCheck arena because these cases are going through the gladiatorial process of fighting things out in courts."
Courts would provide a decision, but would not necessarily provide the truth, he said. What the families and the women wanted was the truth.
"Secondly, they would like someone to say sorry and mean it. It has to be a meaningful apology and preferably it has to come from the people who were at fault."
The third thing was they did not want this to happen to anyone else, he said. If those three issues were dealt with, with grace and compassion, then the issue would be resolved.
