“Patients are not under any greater risk because of this cost-saving measure,” a spokesman for Minister for Health Mary Harney said. “They take their lives in their hands when they go into hospital here anyway.”

The spokesman said it would “clearly have been nonsense” to maintain expensive consultant radiologists to look at stock x-rays. “The tax payer should know that we will not waste their money foolishly,” he said, during a break from whale watching in southern New Zealand.

The spokesman said doctors were well equipped to diagnose patients without proper x-rays. “They can prod patients with their fingers and ask them if it hurts,” he said. “Some consultants will even listen to the answer.”

Meanwhile, the man whose x-rays have been used as stock x-rays has said he feels violated by the experience. “It is like being raped,” Mr Martin Cullen of Waterford said.