FINE GAEL TD Dr James Reilly has been accused by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) of misrepresenting information which it produced about the State's cancer services.
The letter from the ESRI's Prof Miriam Wiley is the second criticism which Dr Reilly, his party's health spokesman, has suffered in less than a week about his use of official cancer-care information. Last week, the National Cancer Screening Service accused Dr Reilly of trying to undermine confidence in the cancer-care services.
Speaking in the Dáil last week, Dr Reilly said that the ESRI did not stand over information it is given by hospitals on the number of discharges taking place from the country's acute hospitals.
He told the Dáil: "I rang the ESRI and I was told that it depends on the information given to it by the hospitals. It does not stand over the information either, and it realises that there is a problem."
In a letter sent last Friday, Prof Wiley denied that anyone in the ESRI had ever said what he claimed to have been told. She said the ESRI always stood over information it had issued.
She said she had sent detailed information to his office a week before the Dáil debate which made it clear that the ESRI stood over the accuracy of its hospital discharge figures.
"I request, therefore, that you immediately take steps to have the record of the Dáil corrected, as failure to do so has the potential to seriously damage the reputation of the ESRI," she said.
Later in the letter Prof Wiley complains that Dr Reilly failed to make it clear when he quoted another ESRI document where the quotation from the institute ended and where his interpretation of its content began.
In her original e-mail to Dr Reilly, Prof Wiley said discrepancies in statistical data needed to be resolved by the hospital and the Department of Health and Children checking their records, and the means by which these were gathered.
However, Dr Reilly went on to tell the Dáil - without making it clear that he had stopped quoting from the letter - that this meant that the State's health service was founded on misinformation.
"That paragraph is your opinion and in no way reflects my opinion . . . because you failed to indicate when the quote from my e-mail was concluded, those listening to the debate and reading the record may very likely form the view that reflects my views," Prof Wiley noted.
"Again, failure to correct this misrepresentation has the potential to do serious damage to my professional reputation. I request . . . you take steps to correct the Dáil record . . ."
Asked for a response last night, Dr Reilly said he needed to check the Dáil record before he would respond to the first of Prof Wiley's criticisms. "It would have been clear where comments began, and her own ended, to anybody who was in the chamber. Anybody there would have realised that I quoted from her e-mail and then drew my own conclusions," he told The Irish Times.
