David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Chair can pick up on this. My question concerned the liability of the State for non-disclosure, where we are not indemnified by the labs, what the estimated liability is and what the actual liability has been so far. Mr. Breen has given reasons that this information cannot be given to us, but we will come back to it.

I want to return to the issue of breaking down the figures into numbers of cases and dividing them by hospital group. I fully understand Mr. Breen's response as to why it would be difficult to break the information down by hospital. We do not want to compare general hospitals with regional hospitals or hospitals that provide specialist services. That could cause a general hospital, which does not provide tertiary care, to be compared with a regional hospital. I completely understand that, but surely the information can be broken down by specialty. I am interested in where the predominance of cases is. Is it in maternity care, cardiac care or cancer care? Where are those cases concentrated? If we know that, we can compare like with like, and perhaps classify hospitals as general hospitals, specialist hospitals or hospitals that provide cancer care. Maybe that is a better way to do it. We do not want to create undue problems for any hospital. People can see that it is unfair to compare apples and oranges. At the same time, we do not want to create circumstances where problems are hidden from public scrutiny because this committee cannot see them. I am interested in comparing like with like, not comparing apples and oranges. Can Mr. Breen comment on whether that type of breakdown could be given to us?