Using the name Anne, the wife of the first haemophiliac to give evidence said her husband was casually informed he was HIV positive in 1985.
They were given very little advice on how to prevent transmission, but the doctor told them to practise safe sex. "The irony of that was you couldn't even buy condoms at that stage," she said.
No counselling was offered. "There was absolutely nobody we could turn to. Everybody had gone under cover . . . quite obviously there was some sort of error made," she said.
Anne said the family went under cover, fearing their children would be ostracised. "We made a decision not to speak about it but somebody took advantage of that. The Government and doctors kept their heads down because they realised somebody or some group made a serious error. We were abandoned."
She said her husband, Dominic, had always been on cryo-precipitate, a clotting agent made from Irish blood donations, from before their marriage in 1969 up to 1984 and they believed he would therefore have escaped HIV infection.
However on one occasion in 1984 when he had a severe bleed in his ankle she rushed him to the National Haemophilia Centre in St James's Hospital in the middle of the night and he was given Factor 8, the alternative clotting agent which was later found to have been contaminated with HIV and hepatitis C.
In 1991 - around the time compensation was being paid to HIV-positive victims - wives and partners of infected persons were advised to be HIV tested, she said. She went for the test and was told the results would be available the next day.
She called the next day but no results were available. This went on for two more days. "I was totally and absolutely convinced at that stage that I was HIV positive," she said.
She could not deal with the idea of their children seeing both parents dying slow, agonising deaths. She felt she was going to have to take all their lives.
However, on the fourth day when she called the test centre she was told she had nothing to worry about.
She described the compensation awarded to her husband by the hepatitis C compensation tribunal in 1996 as amazingly low.
"We queried the award and were advised in view of the serious declining state of his health our most important priority was to get him to see a virologist. He was dying of AIDS. They thought he was dying, that was it," she said.
They made an appointment to see a virologist in Dublin and her husband was put on triple therapy treatment in 1996 and he made remarkable progress.
Last year, however, he suffered a setback. She said she had no life and was just waiting for her husband to die.
"Over the past few days I've just been thinking of all the people I knew who are now dead. One in particular was such a good friend of ours. I feel I have a responsibility to them, to my husband, myself and children to come here and find out what happened," she said.