Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

——was expressing full confidence in Steve Staunton while he retained the confidence of the fans and the players.

The Tánaiste commented yesterday and today on the length of time the tribunal is taking. One of the delays the tribunal will encounter is the legal challenge that has been mounted by the Taoiseach, which he claims is on the basis of protecting parliamentary privilege. Of course that is not the case. It is an attempt by the Taoiseach to buy time. Will the Tánaiste ask the Taoiseach to withdraw his legal challenge to the workings of the tribunal so that it can conclude all this business much more quickly than will otherwise be the case because it will take six to nine months more for the tribunal to do its work if that legal challenge proceeds.

The Tánaiste also said yesterday — he referred to it again today — that the Taoiseach's appearances at the tribunal, the embarrassment he is suffering there and the consequences of that for Government are not distracting from the work of Government. Last autumn we witnessed the sad spectacle of nine women being recalled to a hospital in the Tánaiste's constituency because they were misdiagnosed. They had been given the all clear, but it turned out they had cancer. A woman in Galway was given the all clear on two occasions, but it also turned out she had cancer. There was the case of Ms Rebecca O'Malley, who was misdiagnosed in Limerick. We were promised reports on all those cases and those reports were to have been published before Christmas, outlining what happened, why these women were misdiagnosed and what went wrong. The last time I asked the Taoiseach about it, he said that the report dealing with the Portlaoise case would be published before the end of February. We are now at the end of February, so will that report be published in the next day or two?

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