Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

With no disrespect, my question was slightly different from Deputy Bríd Smith's. She was seeking to ascertain the laboratories from which the inaccuracies came. I am asking a different question. When the first results became available, was a pattern established in the first 20, 40 or 50 women, instead of waiting for all 221?

If all the test results came from one laboratory, I would be inclined to pull the emergency brake and find out what was going on. If they were scattered among all the labs, however, that might create a different situation. It might lead to the conclusion that there is a fault in the system if they are all making the same mistake or are all falling into the same trap. Which would it be? There is no harm to remember that it has to be possible to determine this fairly readily. It would have indicated that one needed to watch what was coming from a particular laboratory, to check what that laboratory was doing, or if a particular laboratory had no negative results at all, to ask why that was the case.