Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Tuesday issued a formal state apology to women whose cervical cancer diagnoses were delayed by failures in a national screening programme.

"On behalf of the state, I apologise to the women and their loved ones who suffered from a litany of failures in how cervical screening in our country operated over many years," Varadkar said in parliament.

"We say sorry to those whose lives were shattered, we say sorry to those whose lives were destroyed and to those whose lives could have been different."

An audit of smears from around 1,500 cervical cancer patients diagnosed from 2008 to 2018 found previous screening tests from approximately 200 women could have provided earlier detection.

"The screening test could have provided a different result or a warning of increased risk or evidence of developing cancer," Ireland's Cervical Check programme said in a statement in May 2018.

The scandal came to light following the case of Vicky Phelan - a cancer patient whose 2014 diagnosis was delayed by an inaccurate smear reading in 2011.

Phelan brought a case against Ireland's Health Services Executive and a testing laboratory to the country's high court, winning a 2.5 million euro ($2.8 million) settlement against the lab.

She refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement and the systemic failures of the scheme came to national attention in April 2018.

A scoping inquiry published in September 2018 uncovered issues "redolent of a whole-system failure" and a number of women whose early smear tests were incorrectly read have since died following battles with cancer.

Offering apologies to "those who passed on and cannot be here" Varadkar called the programme "a system that was doomed to fail". "Today's apology is offered to all the people the state let down and to their families who paid the price for those failures as well," he said. "A broken service, broken promises, broken lives - a debacle that left a country heartbroken."

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019