CervicalCheck is a political football being kicked to death by politicians

What the Government really fears is the voice of a dying woman blaming them for her plight, writes Victoria White

I AM happy that the 209 women whose cervical cancer was not caught during screening are to be offered free medical treatment, free counselling and an ex-gratia payment of €2,000.

I just wonder what sets them apart — except for their participation in Gabriel Scally’s scoping review — from the thousands of other people in this country undergoing cancer treatment, a subset of the 167,700 people who have or have had cancer?

Do those other cancer sufferers not have transport costs, medical costs and childcare costs, which are all the harder to face because they often have to stop working?

Some of these are permanent employees of the State and get paid sick leave. Others are self-employed and are lucky to get an invalidity pension of less than €200 a week. If they recover they may have no job to go back to.

We all know these people. We know what havoc financial worry plays with them when they should be keeping all their strength for their on-going treatment.

I am literally agog that one group of cancer sufferers has suddenly been deemed our priority while there isn’t a peep about all the others.

You’re saying the difference is that it’s the State’s “fault” that these women have cancer and the special treatment is an attempt at recompense.

So those thousands of other people have the “wrong” cancer then, do they?

Or they have the same cancer but were picked up by the screening programme, or have the same cancer and were too stressed or too poorly educated to register for CervicalCheck at all?

Both Vicky Phelan and Emma Mhic Mhathúna — who have terminal cervical cancer following a misread smear test — have described the Government’s response as fearful.

Phelan described the package of measures to help the 209 women as either good sense or “they’re just running terrified and running for the hills”. Emma Mhic Mhathúna said on The Late Late Show that the Government was “afraid” of her.

I reckon she’s right and that should frighten us all.

The Government is frightened because Vicky Phelan won an award of €2.5m against Clinical Pathology Laboratories, where her cervical smear test was misread.

Four cases relating to incorrect smear results have already been listed to come before the High Court, with many more potentially waiting in the wings.

Emma Mhic Mathúna is seeking “exemplary and aggravated damages”.

The cash is the least of it, however. What the Government really fears is the voice of a dying woman blaming them for her plight.

They weren’t helped by the fact that RTÉ made an appalling judgement call in inviting Emma Mhic Mhathúna onto the radio the day after she had been given a terminal diagnosis.

No doubt they, and Mhic Mhathúna herself, will argue that she wanted to go on Morning Ireland.

That’s not good enough. No one who has just received a terminal diagnosis should be broadcasting to the nation the following day.

It’s not fair on her, no matter what she herself thinks at the time. It’s not fair on those close to her. As an editor, I would have refused that item.

With the national broadcaster giving voice to the woman who has just been given the bad news, the Government was in a difficult position.

Panic was not the right response, however. They should have continued to act like the Government, not the opposition.

Instead Minister Regina Doherty was out on radio shows claiming to have no idea what was going on.

Even as the flames of the opposition licked higher, fanned by many including Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly, Fianna Fáil’s Stephen Donnelly and Labour’s Alan Kelly, the Government should have repeated that cervical smear testing programmes have an incorrect reading rate of about 30%, that this should have been better explained to Irish women and that the principle of open disclosure should be firmly established.

“It’s my body, it’s my record,” is how Scally puts it in his scoping review and it’s impossible to argue against that principle.

There should, however, have been some understanding of a clinician’s reluctance to bring a terminally ill woman or a grieving family the news that this appalling outcome might have been avoided if a smear test had not been misread.

This controversy has taught us clinicians should not be offered discretion in this matter.

Paradoxically, full disclosure would have done more to combat the ‘screening did not diagnose my cancer’ headlines the HSE feared, than what was allowed to happen.

Combating those headlines matters, of course, because the success of the screening programme depends on peoples’ confidence in it.

The “shock, horror” memos prepared for HSE boss Tony O’Brien which the opposition painted as a blatant attempt by the HSE to cover its own ass can be read differently as an attempt to protect a hard-won screening programme, which in this country, unlike in most others, is retrospectively audited when diagnoses are made.

BUT conspiracy theory has now completely taken hold of this issue.

Despite Gabriel Scally’s determination this week on RTÉ radio not to brand the HSE’s frustrating delay in the furnishing of relevant documents to him in a searchable format as stonewalling, Liveline presenter Mary Wilson virtually invited Vicky Phelan to thus describe it.

I need hardly add that Labour’s Alan Kelly was “horrified” that Scally was being “stonewalled”, Stephen Donnelly says it shows the State is continuing to fail women, while People Before Profit’s Brid Smith brands it as a “deliberate strategy”.

The women most failed by the State in the diagnosis of cervical cancer are the hundreds of

women who contracted it in the 20 years it took to establish a screening programme after the UK and similar jurisdictions had established one.

Today the real scandal is that an important cancer screening programme is a political football which is being kicked to death by politicians desperate for attention, cheered on by media outlets desperate for audiences.

This is not contributing to the real debate we should be having as to how we can best treat all the cancer sufferers in this country.