Stephen Donnelly ‘anxious’ to publish report on Tony Holohan’s cancelled secondment

Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly is “anxious” to publish a report on the abandoned secondment of Dr Tony Holohan to Trinity College Dublin, the Department of Health has said.

The department has yet to publish the report on the cancelled appointment despite the fact it was submitted last July.

Former head of the Institute of Directors Maura Quinn was appointed to carry out the review and submitted her report last June. She was contacted by Mr Donnelly on July 1st and asked to consider other matters. She submitted a final report later that month.

“The Minister for Health is anxious to publish the report as soon as it is possible,” a spokesman for the department said.

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“Any individuals named in the report are entitled to due process and fair procedures. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to comment until the process is complete and the report is published.”

The proposed appointment of Dr Holohan, who led Ireland’s public health response during the pandemic, to a new professorship in TCD became a political controversy in 2021.

The move was championed by the secretary general of the Department of Health, Robert Watt, who proposed that the department should continue to pay Dr Holohan’s salary. The department also committed to a €2 million-a-year grant for public health research in TCD for the next 10 years of Dr Holohan’s secondment.

There was significant unease throughout Government when the proposal came to light, as there had been no political or ministerial approval for the move.

In an initial report on the issue by Mr Watt, he stood over his role and defended his decision not to inform Mr Donnelly that it was a secondment, claiming there was “nothing unusual” about the arrangement.

Mr Watt also denied that taoiseach Micheál Martin and other members of the Government were “kept in the dark”, saying that the secretary general to the Government, Martin Fraser, was aware of the proposed move in late February and early March.

Mr Donnelly has previously said he is committed to publishing the report.

In a briefing note released last year, which set out the circumstances behind the proposed appointment as professor of public health strategy at TCD, Mr Watt accepted that “elements of this were not communicated well and there are learnings for the Department of Health in this respect”.

He said a press release detailing the planned appointment last March had to be rushed out. “In retrospect this allowed inferences to be drawn which are inaccurate,” he said.

The department also previously released a letter of comfort that Mr Watt wrote to provost of TCD Prof Linda Doyle, which he described as a “backstop” in his briefing note.

In the letter, he guaranteed that the department would pay Dr Holohan’s salary and he also pledged to pay the university a “ring-fenced” sum of €2 million annually to set up, support and operate the new chair on public health strategy.

Mr Watt said in the note that the funding would come by way of research funding from the Health Research Board.

[ Give me a crash course in... the Tony Holohan job controversy ]

Speaking before the Joint Committee on Health last year, Mr Watt said he had initial discussions with Dr Holohan in August 2021 about his future plans.

Amid concern about Covid-19 variants, these conversations were paused. When the epidemiological situation improved, Dr Holohan “raised with some third-level institutions how the Department of Health could, in an innovative and responsive manner, strengthen the knowledge and practice of public health leadership,” Mr Watt said.

“These engagements had particular regard to public health protection, informing policymaking, understanding the role of public communications and behaviour change and research of relevance to these domains.”

Mr Watt said it was “a matter of regret to me that what I viewed as an important and innovative proposal for increasing our public health capacity in Ireland” would not go ahead.