The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, has rejected charges levelled by Judge Alison Lindsay that he failed to defend the findings of her inquiry into the supply of contaminated blood products to haemophiliacs.
In a letter to the Attorney General, Mr Rory Brady, on November 18th last year, Judge Lindsay accused the Minister of failing to provide "a proper public defence" of her €12 million inquiry in the face of criticism from the Opposition and the Irish Haemophiliac Society.
"I would have been entitled to expect the Minister for Health to fully vindicate the independence, fairness and integrity of the report. This was not done," she wrote in the letter, which was disclosed last night on the RTÉ news.
The Minister insisted he had behaved properly. His spokeswoman said last night: "He paid tribute to her professionalism and thanked her for the report when it was published and, later on, during the Dáil debate."
However, Opposition politicians stood over criticisms they expressed at the time.
Rejecting charges that she had launched "vindictive" attacks, Fine Gael's health spokeswoman, Ms Olivia Mitchell, said it was "a fact" that the inquiry had not been able "to get at the truth".
Eighty haemophiliacs died after they received contaminated blood from the BTSB during the 1980s and 1990s, while more have been left with AIDS or hepatitis C.
In her letter, the judge suggested she would dissuade other judges from accepting places on tribunals.
The Irish Haemophilia Society also stood over its criticisms. The society's former president, Mr Brian Mahoney, said the report's "recommendations were very general and its conclusions were fairly indefinite".
The Lindsay letter was copied to the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr McDowell, who delivered a robust Dáil defence of Judge Lindsay.
Describing her report as "a model of clarity, concision and fairness" that followed the terms of reference offered, Mr McDowell said she had suffered "increasingly vindictive and thoughtless attacks".
