Mr. Jim Breslin:

They were related to the objective of the programme to inform the women, not widespread non-disclosure of the results to the women. The knowledge was within the Department that there had been a clinical audit programme undertaken in CervicalCheck with the intention of informing the women. That is set out in the memos. We did not have the specific memos in our documentation that we had pulled together at that stage. The explanation is the absolute commitment that has been under way on the part of all of the officials in the Department to trying to respond to the immediate issues. I have put in place a separate process, one that does not involve those officials, to go through the emails within the Department to establish exactly what we knew. When I sat in at the previous committee meeting, I gave an immediate undertaking because the director general of the HSE had referred to a specific memo from March 2016 that the director general indicated had gone to the Department. I double checked to see where that memo would have come into the Department. I was told by the HSE about it. By that evening I had issued a press statement confirming that the Department had the memos. I then followed them and how they had been handled within the Department. I briefed the Minister and published all of the documentation last Tuesday.