The Department of Health has claimed that the current strike by the State's public health doctors had no impact on the decision of its SARS expert group not to invite athletes from SARS-affected countries travelling to Ireland for the Special Olympics.
The Department's chief medical officer, Dr Jim Kiely, who chaired the expert group meetings, said the decision it made would have been the same whether the public health doctors were available or not.
However, a number of doctors contacted by The Irish Times yesterday expressed dismay at the decision.
They said the public health doctors strike must have had an impact because the work of public health doctors includes the surveillance and control of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, meningitis and SARS.
"One of the problems is the public health doctors strike interfered with the decision-making process," a doctor at a major Dublin hospital said yesterday.
"The doctors would have been needed to organise quarantine for the athletes, for example," the doctor added.
Another doctor pointed to World Health Organisation guidelines for mass gatherings which state "the best defence is not exclusion but good management of the situation in the unlikely event that someone attending a meeting were to become sick with SARS".
Public health doctors would be required for such management, he said.
Meanwhile, The Irish Times has learned that a number of doctors contacted the expert group to express concern that the Irish health-care system would not have been able to cope with any possible SARS outbreak precipitated by athletes travelling from SARS-affected countries.
A senior hospital doctor, who did not want to be named, said: "We all feel we wouldn't be able to cope if there was a crisis. There are not enough isolation facilities and negative pressure rooms.
"But most people feel it's very unfair on the athletes."
Another doctor, who also wished to remain anonymous, expressed the view that the expert group's decision was "heavily influenced" by the public health doctors strike.
"To me that is the kernel of it," the doctor said.
One of the striking public health doctors, the president of the Irish Medical Organisation, Dr Joe Barry, said he, too, believed the strike had had an impact. It was certainly considered by the expert group, he said.
He added that the WHO's guidelines on mass gatherings only issued on Thursday but the expert group appeared to have reached its decision on Wednesday.
"Hopefully when they meet again next Wednesday they will take the new guidelines into account," he said.
The public health doctors have been on strike for five weeks now over pay and working conditions.