The Hong Kong delegation to the Special Olympics in Ireland has expressed surprise at this week's decision by Clonmel Borough Council to recommend it not to travel to the town.
Ms Fay Ho Kim Fai, national director of the delegation, said it was "quite shocked" to hear of the opposition, although it understood people's concerns about the spread of SARS.
Speaking on RTÉ's Prime Time last night, she said she had heard nothing about the scare in Ireland regarding their attendance at the games until yesterday and had thought preparations were continuing as normal.
She added she was not sure about plans to place athletes from Hong Kong and other SARS-affected areas in quarantine for 10-14 days before the event, adding this would be difficult.
The administrator noted that the Hong Kong sports community had taken precautions to protect their athletes, separating them for training, taking their temperatures and closing practice venues to the public.
While the delegation could not give guarantees, she said, it would take every precaution to ensure there was no threat of SARS spreading during the games next month.
She added she had no problem with switching to another host town such as Greystones, Co Wicklow, which had been offered as a back-up venue.
Ms Evelyn Cawley of the Greystones Host Town Committee, who extended the invitation, yesterday urged people to be "a bit more rational and reasonable" about the threat of SARS.
Meanwhile, the joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children was told yesterday by the CEO of the Eastern Regional Health Authority that there was an 18-month supply of surgical masks in stock which could be used in the event of any SARS outbreak here. He also said isolation facilities for contacts of SARS patients had been identified in each health board area.
The committee chairman, Mr Batt O'Keeffe, asked why the director of the National Disease Surveillance Centre, Dr Darina O'Flanagan, had not absented herself from the public health doctors' strike and continued to work with the State's SARS expert group.
The former IMO president, Dr Fintan Howell, said it would have been "an appalling figleaf" for her to do so when her colleagues were on the picket line. He said she could never have done the work of the NDSC on her own.
The secretary-general of the Department of Health, Mr Michael Kelly, said the absence of public health doctors had hampered its response to the threat of SARS. Had "the figleaf" been in place, he said, it would have helped.
He went on to reject any suggestion that the Government's response to the SARS threat had been "bungled".
The Department's chief medical officer, Dr Jim Kiely, also told the committee that it should not be a cause for concern when the status of a SARS patient changed from suspect to probable or vice versa. This reclassification happened regularly as new information came to light, he said.
Meanwhile, the strike by the State's 270 public health doctors is to continue after the failure of talks at the Labour Relations Commission yesterday. No new discussions are planned.
A spokesman for the doctors, Mr Fintan Hourihan of the Irish Medical Organisation, said no proposals had been put on the table by management. Asked if the dispute would be escalated next week as threatened, through industrial action by doctors in other areas, he said: "All options are now on the table".