The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mr Martin, is set to be called before the official inquiry into how warnings about the legality of nursing home charges for elderly patients were not acted on for over a year and a half.
The inquiry, to be headed by Mr John Travers, a former head of the State advisory board for enterprise, Forfás, is also expected to seek evidence from two Ministers of State, Mr Ivor Callely and Mr Tim O'Malley.
The inquiry will look into how the Department of Health did not seek advice from the Attorney General on legal opinion secured by a health board that the charges, levied on medical card patients for their care in public nursing homes, were illegal.
A spokesman for the Tánaiste told The Irish Times last night that it was expected that the inquiry would seek to hear from her predecessor, Mr Martin, as well as from the minsters of state who served in the Department of Health at the time.
The Department of Health received the eight-page legal opinion from the South-Eastern Health Board in March 2003. However, the matter was not brought to the Attorney General's office until October this year after queries were raised in the Dáil by Fine Gael.
Mr Martin said earlier this week that he was never shown the South-Eastern Health Board's legal opinion.
He said yesterday that he arrived late for a meeting between the Department of Health and health board chief executives in December last year, at which the issue of the charges was discussed, according to official minutes released by Ms Harney.
The Tánaiste said in the Dáil on Thursday that a letter was drawn up in the Department of Health last January for the secretary-general to sign, seeking advice on the charges issue from the Attorney General. However, it was never sent out.
She refused yesterday to condemn the 2001 Government decision to offer medical cards to the over-70s. She said that a decision taken in 1976 by the then minister for health, Mr Brendan Corish, had led to the present difficulty. "It would be wrong to imply any element of blame to Minister Martin . . . It was a collective political decision made by the Cabinet," she said of the 2001 move to increase medical card eligibility.
"Maybe at the time we all made the decision somewhat in the dark in relation to the numbers involved and the costs involved. We are where we are," Ms Harney said, adding that there was no question of taking medical cards away from the over-70s.
A spokesman for Mr O'Malley told The Irish Times that the Minister of State, who still serves in the Department of Health, maintains that the minutes were an accurate reflection of the meeting but that the charges were not part of his responsibility.
Mr Callely, who now serves in the Department of Transport, but who had responsibility for services for the elderly while in the Department of Health, could not be contacted last night.