At a meeting of the Oireachtas committee on health, Solidarity-People Before Profit TD, Bríd Smith, said many of the missing slides had serious misreadings.

A leading campaigner in the CervicalCheck scandal has quit a key oversight committee in frustration at how a review of women’s smear tests was conducted.

There were “missed opportunities” to prevent or diagnose cancer in some women but, overall, Ireland’s cervical screening programme is performing effectively, according to an independent review by British doctors.

The review of 1,034 women's CervicalCheck slides has found that in around 30% of cases, it recorded a different result to the original finding.