Fianna Fáil senator Margaret Cox has criticised the Government for a series of "broken promises" over BreastCheck, the national breast-screening programme.
The senator, who ran unsuccessfully for Galway West in the last general election, has expressed doubts over the recent promise by Minister of Health Mary Harney to extend the service to the west and south by 2007.
Ms Cox has initiated a petition to put pressure on the Government, while Labour south Kerry TD Breeda Moynihan-Cronin has already collected 20,000 signatures in a campaign for extending the service to her county.
Earlier this month, the Tánaiste said she was confident the target date of 2007 for extending BreastCheck to the regions would be met when she moved to appoint a design team to draw up construction plans for two new clinical units in Cork and Galway. The two units will be built at a cost of about €25 million and will be based at the South Infirmary/Victoria Hospital in Cork and University College Hospital, Galway.
The Cork service, which will have three associated mobile units, will cover Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Waterford and south Tipperary, where there are approximately 72,000 women in the target population.
The Galway service will have two mobile units and will cover Galway, Sligo, Roscommon, Donegal, Mayo, Leitrim, Clare and north Tipperary, where there are an estimated 58,000 women in the target population.
A €3 million capital investment has also been earmarked for developing a symptomatic breast centre in Galway.
The move was given a qualified welcome by several western TDs, including Mayo Independents Dr Jerry Cowley and Ms Beverley Flynn. Dr Cowley, who initiated the campaign to extend the service in 2002, said it was tragic that 65 more women would have to die needlessly before the new services were in place.
While she believed the Government "was committed" to extending the service to the west, promises made in 2005 had been broken, Ms Cox said. She feared that this pledge would also be broken without "constant pressure".
She has sent petition forms to more than 600 local organisations seeking support for her campaign."In our region, cancer is responsible for more than half the deaths of women aged between 30 and 60 years of age", she said at the weekend. "More women in the west get breast cancer than in other parts of the country. "
The petition initiated six weeks ago by a group called BreastCheck for Kerry Now, chaired by Ms Moynihan-Cronin, has collected 20,000 signatures. All major towns in the county were targeted at the weekend, according to the group's spokesman Owen O'Shea.
The Kerry group has been in touch with other campaigns in Cork, Limerick and Tipperary and hopes to present its accumulated petitions to the Minister for Health shortly.
Free breast cancer screening for women aged 50-64 has been available to women in Dublin and the east since 2000. Ms Moynihan-Cronin said wanted to see age limits widened to include women aged 40 to 70.
