Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will finish on this point and then we will come back to the Estimates. The direct question I put to the Minister is that he has now accepted responsibility for the decision he made. The committee has multiple documented evidence that there was expert clinical advice given to the Department before the announcement and that the director general of the HSE advised him to walk back the next day but, more importantly, as the year progressed and the delays mounted, he was contacted directly from multiple sources to ask him to stop the free test, he refused, and we now have 80,000 women waiting up to eight months and we have many women waiting for the introduction of the HPV test. Given that the Minister accepts responsibility, will he apologise to all those women who are now waiting because of the decision he made against all of this advice?