The long-awaited report on the proposed secondment of Dr Tony Holohan, the former chief medical officer, to a professorship in Trinity College Dublin is rightly critical of the handling of the whole process. The report, by Dr Maura Quinn, concludes that the proposal was rushed through without proper consultation within government and with other key players involved. As controversy broke last year, Dr Holohan decided not to proceed with the secondment. However, disagreements among senior government officials on who knew what, and when, means the controversy will now run on.
The report is critical of a number of aspects of the proposed appointment. It says it should have been the subject of much wider consultation across the public service, including with the Department of Public Expenditure and the Health Research Board, which was to oversee a proposed ¤2 million in promised annual payments from the Department of Health to fund the role. This proposed arrangement “by-passed all of the accepted protocols for research funding”, the report found. Nor should Dr Holohan have been “personally exclusively involved” in the negotiations on funding linked to the appointment.
The report shows senior officials disagreeing on what happened. Robert Watt, the secretary general of the Department of Health, says that senior ministerial advisers were told and said it was not accurate to suggest that the government did not know. But former Department of the Taoiseach secretary general Martin Fraser says he only knew about the outline details and the then taoiseach’s chief of staff, Deirdre Gillane, says she was not informed until just before the affair became public.
There is a need for transparent procedures for situations such as the one at the centre of this row. Dr Holohan provided the State with valuable service during the pandemic. The proposed role may have made sense. But the case for the appointment and the associated substantial funding should have been properly made. And it clearly was not.