Green Party TD Ciarán Cuffe has hit out at the Minister for the Environment's failure to take part in an Oireachtas committee delegation visiting the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Britain.
A cross-party group of TDs are visiting the ageing complex following a major radioactive leak last April, but Dick Roche will not be attending and claims he was not invited.
"I think that Minister Roche should have agreed to visit the site with the committee. I called on him a number of times to do so," Mr Cuffe said.
But Mr Roche rejected the claim, saying the committee secretariat confirmed that no formal invitation had been sent out.
"This is another example of Ciarán Cuffe and his Green Party colleagues twisting the truth. Their standard approach is to deliberately mislead the public," the minister said in a statement.
"Mr Cuffe obviously does not understand the concept of separation of powers between the Government of the day and Oireachtas Committees," he added.
Mr Roche said he would meet the British secretary of state for trade and industry Alan Johnson next month and he had already raised the matter of the leak with him.
"There are still many important questions that the Irish government should be asking in relation to Sellafield," Mr Cuffe said.
"Some of these questions relate specifically to last spring's leak at the plant and some relate to broader issues of Sellafield's future and its impact on human and environmental safety. "Now is not the time to be complacent."
Two senior managers at the plant were suspended following the leak but news did not emerge for some months. One of the managers was disciplined and another is facing action after acid containing uranium and plutonium leaked from a pipe.
PA