A STATE board was "bordering on the criminally negligent" in the hepatitis C controversy, the Fianna Fail spokeswoman on health, Ms Maire GeogheganQuinn, claimed in the Dail yesterday.
Because of the negligence, the lives of victims had been ruined she added. There was also a rigid Government agenda to deny the victims their basic rights and the truth. "I do not believe that we have had, the truth relating to this matter.
Ms Geoghegan Quinn said she did not accept the Department of Health was one thing and the BTSB another. "It is an agency of your Department," she told the Minister, Mr Noonan, "and it is paid for by the same taxpayer who pays for the Department."
Calling for a judicial inquiry into the affair, Ms GeogheganQuinn, she said that it was the time in eight months that the issue had been raised in the Dail. The opposition had asked for the truth, for a statutory tribunal, for an admission of liability and a public apology.
The PD spokeswoman on health, Ms Liz O'Donnell said the Minister was attempting to distance the State from the BTSB. "I believe that this is a masterpiece of political fiction . . . It is a nonsense. The board is the State. It is the State which pays the board, it is the State which establishes the board, it is the State which will pay the compensation."
She said never before in the House had there been an attempt by the Minister to distance himself and the State as a defendant. "I believe this whole debacle has high lighted the impotence of Dail Eireann as an inquiring body, as a body which holds the executive, with its State agencies, to account."
There had been a failure by the House from the very beginning to extract the truth, she added. The BTSB's admission of liability for negligence had only come about because of a court action, which highlighted yet again how the House had been denied a role in extracting the truth.