As the health service was engulfed by the scandal over the CervicalCheck screening programme, top medics and officials wanted that there wasn’t capacity to deal with the crisis while also maintaining the service’s normal operation, writes Health Correspondent Catherine Shanahan.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has described as highly unsatisfactory that examination of 3,000 smear tests have not yet begun, despite promises they would be complete more than a month ago.