Mr. Jim Breslin:

Having lived through this, we are looking back on it in a way that was not how the real time chronology of events took place. We all lived through that. We are all sitting here now having been part of a discussion on the need for the programme to respond to public anxiety. The Minister was being pressed to make a call on that. People, including Members of the House, were calling for him to do that, phone calls to the helpline were calling for him to do that, and officials worked with him to try to make the best decision possible in that situation. That decision was made in hours and days, and not in weeks. If the Vice Chairman is asking me if a full capacity analysis was performed, if there was a full review of all of the capacity and the global potential to increase that, the answer is that there was not. There was a worthwhile and honourable desire to try to respond to the anxiety existing.

Some of that anxiety was based on misinformation and information that was not accurate. It was only when we got the Scally report that clarity was brought to the underlying issues. I lived through that period and I did not have the ability to go off and do a capacity study for weeks on end to try to come up with what the right number of retests was going to be. That was not the problem we were faced with. We were faced with a demand to make a decision because women were going to present to their general practitioner, GP, on Monday and Tuesday of the following week and the Government had to have a policy on whether that was going to be financed. That was how the decision was made.