Sinn Féin has called on the Government to publish all records about the handling of legal claims around refunds over the State's failure to provide nursing home care to older people.

Reports at the weekend suggested successive Taoisigh and health ministers agreed a secret plan to hide the true scale of the State's liability for illegal nursing home charges to prevent massive payouts.

The Irish Daily Mail report was based on documents purporting to show how successive senior leaders acted together to thwart repayments worth billions to those wrongly charged.

Sinn Féin's health spokesman David Cullinane told Newstalk Breakfast it is claimed a memo was set out by the Department of Health.

This memo set out what was a legal strategy that the contention is - [it] was secret - that was about forcing families to take court cases as opposed to settling," he said.

"It also contends that the HSE or the department would have known that they would have lost the cases.

"So they would take the cases up to the point of discovery, and then drop the cases and settle."

'Take these allegations seriously'

Deputy Cullinane said he does not accept that any such move was to discourage everyone from taking a case for the sake of the taxpayer.

"These are allegations, and obviously we have to take all of these allegations seriously," he said.

"If what is purported is true, then I don't think that argument stacks up at all - because I don't believe it's in the interest of the State that the State itself, or a Government department, would contrive to ensure that people who are entitled to payments would not get them and force them through the courts."

'We need the full facts'

He said we should have all the facts available.

"I think what's reasonable is that all of the documents which are referenced in this article are published," he said.

"The main one is obviously this memo that was prepared for Government; there was a number of other memos referenced as well to other ministers for health.

"So, I don't believe it's unreasonable that Government would publish all of the information; we need the full facts.

"I want to determine for myself exactly what was happening; [that’s] the only way for anybody to fully establish the facts... so let's publish all of the information and all of the memos and then let's see for ourselves.

"If this is true, I think it is a huge scandal... which obviously will have to be fully investigated.

"But the first step, the very first step, is that all of this information is published," he added.