Dr. Tony Holohan:

Our understanding of the memorandums is exactly as the understanding of their intention was - that these were confirmation of an organisation seeking to disclose information to women and making preparations to do that. We had a series of meetings in which we had this information available to us. We were able to track and assure ourselves that preparations were not only continuing but proceeding and progressing to a conclusion in the late summer with those letters issuing. That gave us assurance that two things were happening in our screening programme, namely, the introduction of clinical audit and feeding those findings back to the patients concerned. That would put us towards the fore in international practice in this area. We had confirmation that was happening. What the Secretary General and I are saying is that what has come to light is that in 2016, in fact, that information was not being disclosed. That fact did not become known to us until the end of April.