THERE IS no question of a cover-up in dealing with the handling of the controversy about the 58,000 X-rays at Tallaght hospital that were never reviewed by a consultant radiologist, Taoiseach Brian Cowen has insisted.

And he said there would be an inquiry into why the numbers were so great.

He rejected claims by Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny that “it smacks of a gigantic cover-up that only those who had problems would be informed”.

Mr Cowen said that in the four-year period concerned, some 790,000 X-rays were taken.

“If we were talking about making this issue known before the clinical review is conducted, we would be trying to find out if the 790,000 people who had those X-rays were affected,” he said.

During turbulent Dáil exchanges, the Taoiseach said the review of the remaining 23,000 X-rays should be completed by May.

He said people needed to be reassured generally about the risk involved.

“As we have seen from the 38,000 cases already reviewed, there was a delayed diagnosis in two,” Mr Cowen said.

But Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said the Taoiseach “does not know the level of risk” because of the number of cases yet to be reviewed. “There are 14,000 patients who, over the past four years, had a total of 23,000 X-rays carried out at Tallaght hospital that were not examined by a radiologist. Those X-rays have not yet been reviewed.”

Mr Cowen said, however, that “the fact that there has been a delayed diagnosis in just two of the 38,000 cases is an indication – not a confirmation but an indicative, statistical indication – that we are dealing with relatively low risk”.

Mr Kenny, who first raised the issue, described the revelations about the X-rays as “the best example of the national failure of this Government”, and said Minister for Health Mary Harney had “washed her hands of it and decided not to meddle, and we know that one patient died last year”.

The Fine Gael leader believed it was “unconscionable that a number of people, more than twice the population of Co Leitrim, should not have their X-rays read over a four-year period. We now know that one person has died, another is being treated for cancer and there is a possibility that many people are walking around with undetected tumours or other problems because X-rays have not been read by radiologists.”

Mr Cowen insisted there was no cover-up and said there was a priority to review the cases.