A chartered accountant was yesterday appointed to chair the board of the new interim Health Services Executive (HSE) which will have responsibility for driving the Government's controversial health service reforms.
He is Mr Kevin Kelly, former managing director of AIB bank.
Mr Kelly said he recognised the challenge ahead of him was "enormous", but he said he was looking forward to it very much.
"When the Minister approached me, the reason why I agreed to accept the position was his commitment to achieve all the reforms that are in the pipeline, and it seems if it all happens I believe it will be very good for the health service."
He added he wouldn't have taken on the position if he didn't believe the Minister and the rest of the Cabinet fully supported the reform programme.
When it was suggested to him that the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, didn't seem supportive, he said: "I have to form a judgement on the overall situation, and the sense of commitment that I have picked up is quite extraordinary."
He said the reform programme was multifaceted, and had to be looked at in its totality.
That programme includes abolishing health boards, reorganising hospital services into regional networks as proposed by the Hanly report, and renegotiating a new contract for hospital consultants.
The job of the interim HSE, which will be established on a statutory footing by 2005, will be to fill the management vacuum at the heart of the health service identified in the Brennan report, which conducted an audit of its financial accountability.
The woman who chaired the group which drew up that report, Prof Niamh Brennan, has also been appointed a member of the board of the interim HSE by Mr Martin.
This is despite her criticisms of the Department of Health in recent months for delays in appointing the board.
Asked why, Mr Martin said Prof Brennan had made a very significant contribution to the reform programme, particularly in relation to financial governance and management issues.
Other board members are Dr Donal de Buitleir, general manager, office of the chief executive, AIB Group; Prof Anne Scott, head of the school of nursing at Dublin City University; Mr Michael McLoone, former chief executive of Beaumont Hospital and former chairman of the blood bank; Mr Michael B. Murphy, dean of the faculty of medicine at the National University of Ireland, Cork; Mr P. J. Fitzpatrick, chief executive of the Courts Service and former chief executive of the Eastern Health Board; Mr Liam Downey, former chief executive of medical technology company Becton Dickinson Ireland and a current member of the Labour Relations Commission; Mr John A. Murphy, professor of business studies at Trinity College; Dr Maureen Gaffney, chair of the National Economic and Social Forum and a senior lecturer at Trinity College; and Mr Eugene McCague, a solicitor and partner with Arthur Cox & Associates.
The Irish Patients' Association last night criticised the absence of a patient representative on the board.
Mr Martin said he had endeavoured to come up with "a good range of competencies that would match the tasks" that had been set for the HSE.
Kevin Kelly: Career to date
Mr Kevin Kelly is no stranger to financially sick patients. In the late 1980s, the government charged him with rescuing PMPA, then the country's largest motor insurer, when it threatened to go under owing millions.
He successfully steered the insurer into the black, and set it on the road to profitable State ownership. Afterwards, he said the toughest part of the experience was dealing with publicity. That's something he'll be getting a lot of in his new role as chair of the interim Health Services Executive.
Mr Kelly began his career as an accountant. He worked first with Coopers & Lybrand, and then with PricewaterhouseCoopers when Price Waterhouse took over Coopers. He worked mainly in the area of receiverships, where he developed expertise in dealing directly with financially troubled businesses.
During his career he worked in Italy and the Netherlands, and lectured in management in London. Beginning in 1982, he served two terms as Coopers and Lybrand managing partner. At the age of 50 in 1991, he took the business community by surprise and joined AIB as group finance director.
He then took over the division with which most people deal, retail and commercial, before becoming managing director. His time there threw him into another financial storm, the DIRT scandal, which revealed that in the late 1980s, before he joined AIB, the banks helped clients to evade DIRT tax by using bogus non-resident accounts.
Barry O'Halloran