Screening scandal - Here come the cancer solicitors

SO, IT seems the prospect of rubbing salt into the wounds caused by the dodgy cancer diagnosis scandal at Portlaoise General Hospital has become very real.

Some of the women affected by this fiasco have contacted solicitors to assess the possibility of seeking damages from the authorities.

Given the depth of the scandal, especially how details of it were coldly announced in public before the women at the centre of the controversy were informed, it is not at all surprising that litigation is being considered.

Neither is it likely that the authorities — be they the minister or her representatives at the HSE — will be able to defend all, or even the majority of, such actions.

If any woman was subjected to the trauma attached to having to endure a second set of cancer tests, and if the news was as frightening as it can be, then that woman is absolutely entitled to seek whatever comfort she may be afforded by the courts. Though the process is at an early stage there is already one certainty.

Should any of the misfortunate women successfully sue the State you and yours and every worker in the country will pick up the tab. Though the minister will assure us that this is a HSE problem the bill will be paid with government cash.

We have a long and growing tradition of tremendously expensive litigation focusing on “oversights” that have cost the State hundreds of millions.

The army deafness saga is a classic of the kind.

A total of 16,760 claims were made to the Department of Defence, of which 15,605 had been settled at a cost of €280.9 million and €95m in plaintiffs’ legal costs. To this day there is conflict over the legal fees charged in this fiasco and several solicitors stand accused of overcharging clients.

But the really amazing thing is that nobody in the army, the Department of Defence or anywhere else realised that repeated use of firearms without using hearing protection would cause deafness.

And someone might sue.

Did our Minister for Health, whether directly or through the HSE or her department officials, not realise when they were told about clapped-out cancer screening equipment that the consequences of misdiagnosis would cost a lot, lot more than replacement equipment?

Just as in the Neary scandal, the religious sexual abuse scandals, the contaminated blood scandals and the army deafness cases we don’t seem to have learnt the lessons.

Because of this the prospect of multimillion settlements — and gravy trains full of purring legal teams — looms once again. There must be some mechanism short of a full-battle-dress courtroom conflict to resolve this mess. Maybe a tribunal with the powers of a court but without the huge, incomprehensible legal fees.

However frustrating it is to consider the possible expense of another courtroom showdown the central figures in this scandal must not be forgotten and they — the women so badly let down by the system — are entitled to their day of reckoning.