RTÉ has comments from the upcoming episode of The Meaning of Life, following criticism from Vicky Phelan’s solicitor.
The penultimate episode of the programme will air on RTÉ One this evening, and it will see Joe Duffy speak with former Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan about the loss of his beloved wife Eimear.
In an unedited cut of the interview, seen by the Mail On Sunday, Dr. Holohan said women did not receive a delayed diagnosis of cancer as a result of the misreading of smears through the CervicalCheck screening programme.
He said he “wouldn’t characterise them as misreadings [but] differences of opinion”, adding: “There was no delayed diagnoses, there was no misdiagnoses in our screening programme. That’s not to say at the level of the individual, that there may well have been some individuals.”
Cian O’Carroll, who represented the late cervical cancer campaigner Vicky Phelan and other women affected by the CervicalCheck scandal, described Dr. Holohan’s comments as “gross untruths”.
In a letter to RTE’s director of programming, Mr O’Carroll said the interview “should not be broadcast without some clear expression or contextualisation of those untruths for viewers”.
He asked RTÉ to either pull the programme or at least include a message “which would inform viewers that these were alternative facts” spoken by Dr. Holohan in the interview.
His letter read: “In many of the hundreds of cases taken to date against CervicalCheck and the private laboratories to which it outsourced the reading and interpretation of those smears, negligence causing death and truly horrific injuries has been admitted.”
“In many more cases, that negligence was effectively conceded through the payment of massive damages that no private company would ever contemplate unless it knew it bore a clear responsibility for the harm caused.”
“The failings of CervicalCheck were many and complex but for each patient harmed, it usually came down to a misreading of a smear test down the lens of a microscope.”
“Those errors caused a failure to detect a pre-cancer and those women in most cases went on to develop invasive cancer as a direct consequence of that error. Dr Holohan is denying that this happened and that is manifestly untrue.”
“In fact, he goes further than deny that any woman got cancer as a result of these failures, he actually states that there was no negligence, and these errors were just ‘differences of opinion’.”
“The High Court and the Supreme Court have taken a very different view and I think when it comes to pronouncements on what does or does not constitute medical negligence, we must be guided by judges,” Mr O’Carroll explained.
RTÉ has since confirmed to The Mirror that it had taken Mr. O’Carroll’s concerns on board and made changes to the programme ahead of its transmission.
An RTÉ spokeswoman said that The Meaning of Life is “not a current affairs programme and its one-to-one format does not always allow contrary opinions to be aired”.
“There are strongly held opinions and huge sensitivities around this issue and a format such as this is, which has a moral and spiritual focus, is not always the best place to tease out nuance.”
“On balance, we decided to make further changes to the programme ahead of transmission”, she added.
Vicky received a false negative test after she went for a cervical smear test back in 2011.
Three years later, the Kilkenny native was diagnosed with cancer, and in January 2017, she was informed that she only had months to live.
In April 2018, Vicky was awarded €2.5million in damages in the High Court over the error, and her story led to the CervicalCheck scandal.
Vicky sadly passed away in the early hours of November 14 at Milford Hospice in Limerick aged 48.
