Mr. Jim Breslin:

There was massive public anxiety and the veracity of the whole programme was being questioned. In light of the Scally report, the situation moved towards a whole series of very serious issues, but not towards some of the issues that were being debated and which were out in public in the teeth of this. The report narrowed down the issues to those we are now working on under the implementation plan. In that situation, in which the Minister had been reassured about the quality assurance within the current laboratories, he wrote to the HSE to say that he was going to bring an end to the retesting.