The Irish government launched an inquiry into the scandal earlier this month, to examine the outsourcing of cervical cancer services to laboratories in the US and establish why CervicalCheck failed to tell women what the audits of their smear tests had discovered.

The inquiry also aims to discover how much the HSE and the Irish Department of Health knew about the audit. Its findings are expected to be reported in June.

The Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar, has said that his government is “acting as quickly as we can to get on top of this issue”.

According to Varadkar, the Irish government has four main priorities: helping women who have been affected, getting the facts through the inquiry, holding people to account, and restoring confidence in cancer screenings.

The cervical cancer scandals in England and Ireland, explained