Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has said that neither he nor his Government could take responsibility for the 120,000 workers in the health sector, during a heated leaders' questions in the Dáil this morning.
Mr Ahern was answering questions from Opposition leaders in relation to the recent row over misdiagnosis of breast cancer at the Midland Regional Hospital in Portlaoise, Co Laois.
In answer to a question from Labour leader Eamon Gilmore, the Taoiseach said: "I'm not in this House to stand over every single member of the HSE working in every part of the 26 counties today is doing an entirely excellent job."
"How can I do that?" he asked.
Labour leader Eamonn Gilmore
Mr Gilmore had asked the Taoiseach "where the buck stops" in relation to the current crisis in the health service.
The Labour leader said: "You're a great man to come in here and cast aspersions on people who are working in the health service [but] the one thing you didn't do was own up and stand up for the responsibility the you have yourself and that your Government has had."
"How much longer do you want to put our health service right, you've now served a probationary period of over 10 years and its in a mess," Mr Gilmore added.
The Taoiseach replied: "I reject the position that you can come in here and just castigate a health service that we put in place and it is a good health service."
Mr Ahern also said his job was not to answer for the consultants of the country.
"If I for one minute wrote one letter to any consultant in this country that said anything that affected their medical independence you would be the first in here ranting and raving that I was interfering with them," Mr Ahern added.
In the Dáil this evening, Minister of State at the Department of Health Jimmy Devins said he wished to extend his apologies to those women affected by the misdiagnoses at the Portlaoise hospital.
"I can only imagine the torment and anguish these women are going through at the moment," he said.
Mr Devins said he concurred with the comments of Health Service Executive chief executive Brendan Drumm, who said the situation was "appalling".
"It is imperative that something like this is not allowed to happen again," he said.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny earlier said what went wrong at the Midland Regional Hospital was the result of a failure of the system put in place by the Government. "This was your system, this was your policy and this was your failure," Mr Kenny said.
However, Mr Ahern denied it was a system failure. "I'm not into a blame game in any of this, because there's a report being prepared", the Taoiseach said.
He said that issues about staff, equpiment and quality assurance would form part of the report which is due by the end of the month.
"There are people's careers involved in this so I don't want to say anything that affects the individual staff that are involved in it," Mr Ahern told the Dáil.
However, the Toaiseach also seemed to contradict the Minister for Health Mary Harney when he said that the lack of triple assessment was not to blame in the case.
On Monday Ms Harney told RTÉ's Six-Onenews: "The reality is here that we didn't have a triple assessment, the hospital with the volume of activity like Portlaoise could never have that, and that is why it was totally unsafe to have breast cancer dealt with in 35 hospitals around this country."
Today though, the Taoiseach told the Dáil that triple assessment only applies where cancer is identified.
"Since in these cases the cancer wasn't identified that issue about triple assessment doesn't arrive at all," he said.
Later Fine Gael Health Spokesperson, Dr James Reilly, said the Taoiseach was wrong in his definition of triple assessment and that his comments would "undermine" people's hopes for centres of excellence for cancer treatment.
Dr Reilly said: "Triple assessment is a diagnostic system to determine treatment for the patient. It arises once a patient has shown symptoms of breast disease but it is incorrect to say that it takes place only after the patient has already been identified as having cancer.
"In both St James's and St Vincent's Hospital it is clear that triple assessment is a means of arriving at a diagnosis", he added.
