THE Opposition parties want the Minister for Health and his Minister of State to make personal statements in the Dail on Tuesday on the Hepatitis C controversy. The Fianna Fail spokeswoman, Mrs Maire Geoghegan Quinn, and the Progressive Democrats' leader, Ms Mary Harney, pointed yesterday to the discrepancy between recent statements by Mr Noonan and the Minister of State, Mr Brian O'Shea, and the evidence given by Mr Liam Dunbar, the acting chief executive of the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB), to the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday.

The new controversy relates to a file laid before the High Court recently which revealed that a donor whose plasma was used in the manufacture of Anti D immunoglobulin was known by the BTSB to have infective hepatitis in 1976. Both Ministers claimed last month that the expert group which investigated the Hepatitis C situation was aware of this information when drawing up its report. Mr Dunbar told the committee that this file was not shown to the expert group.