Stephen Teap is giving late wife Irene a voice with new support group

In his wildest dreams, Stephen Teap could never have envisaged the position he finds himself in: “A man in the middle of a women’s health scandal.”

Tue, 16 Oct, 2018 - 05:00

Catherine Shanahan

In his wildest dreams, Stephen Teap could never have envisaged the position he finds himself in: “A man in the middle of a women’s health scandal.”

“That’s where I find myself now, but it’s the only way I could give Irene a voice,” he says.

The widower and father of two says he and others caught up in the CervicalCheck scandal have been “dragged into a world we never asked for, and we wouldn’t wish it on our worst enemies”.

“I would hand it back in a second. But it affected us so much that the only way out is to get some good out of it. It affected us so badly that nothing else is an option.”

Stephen, 37, has scaled back his working week from five days to four to spend more time with his two sons, Noah, 3, and Oscar, 5, and to meet the demands of his new role as a spokesperson for women like his deceased wife, Irene.

My priority is the boys and everything is built around them,” he said.

Stephen said both boys are doing “really well”, that they have great support from family and friends, and that Noah has just started Montessori.

Irene Teap, from Carrigaline, Co Cork, was diagnosed with stage-two cancer in 2015 and died on July 26 last year, after two false negative tests in 2010 and 2013.

She was among at least 221 women with cervical cancer who had smears misread, affecting the timing and type of intervention from which they could have benefited.

Most of Stephen’s evenings are now taken up with work around a new support group, the 221+ CervicalCheck Patient Support Group, whose main objective is to meet the needs of patients directly affected by the controversy and their next of kin.

Vicky Phelan,Stephen Teap, and Lorraine Walsh, all of whom have been affected by the cancer scandal, at the launch of the 221+ Cervical Check Patient Support Group

The group was launched at the weekend by Stephen, Limerick woman Vicky Phelan, who has terminal cancer and whose court case revealed the scandal, and Galway woman Lorraine Walsh, whose cancer robbed her of the chance to have a family, but who is now cancer free.

Stephen said the key thing for the group is “reaching out to those in dark pockets of the country” who have been affected by the controversy but feel as though they had nowhere to turn or no-one they could trust.

Stephen and Lorraine are also on a steering programme tasked with overseeing changes to the CervicalCheck screening programme.

Separately, it has emerged that the State is to take over part of the service for examining CervicalCheck smears, with a number of employees of Dublin-based MedLab Pathology set to become State employees.

HSE contracts with MedLab and Quest Diagnostics in the US expired at the weekend.

Yesterday the HSE said it was “happy to say” that continuity of supply arrangements with both cytology laboratories had been agreed beyond the contract date of last Sunday.