MEMBERS OF THE Oireachtas Health Committee have accused the Secretary General of the Department of Health Robert Watt of ‘seriously mishandling’ the proposed secondment of Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan to Trinity College.
The proposed role, announced in March, was intended to be a newly created position of Professor of Public Health Strategy and Leadership. The plan was abandoned due to controversy over the proposed salary and how it would be funded.
The Department of Health had said it would continue to pay Holohan’s salary during the secondment, which is reported to be around €187,000 per year. Officials have subsequently said the salary would largely have been paid for from competitive research funding.
In his opening statement to the committee today, Robert Watt said he first held discussions with Holohan about his future plans in August 2021 and that a number of subsequent engagements focused on “future pandemic preparedness… policy making and the role of public communications”.
Trinity College had made it clear it was not in a position to fund the role, but was “enthusiastic” about it, Watt said.
Watt was repeatedly questioned about a letter of intent he sent on 16 March to the Provost of Trinity College about the proposal, in which he stated that the department “commits” to make an annual ring-fenced allocation of €2 million for the duration of the secondment, to be administered through the Health Research Board.
Watt said Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly “knew the generality”, but was not involved in the details of the proposal. He said he did not believe the minister knew of the proposed commitment of €2 million in funding when he was first interviewed about the secondment on national radio.
“You are committing €2 million in funding from the Health Research Board to Trinity College in a letter that you did not get any ministerial approval for, that you did not inform the minister about, that you did not inform this committee about,” Sinn Féin’s health spokesperson David Cullinane said, in his questioning of Watt.
“And you then say in your opening statement that, retrospectively, this would have to be approved through the estimates process.
I have to say, Mr Watt, this is breathtaking arrogance that a secretary general would sign off on a spend €2 million without seeking any approval whatsoever from a minister or from government, that you think that you have the authority to spend €20 million [if the secondment lasted ten years] potentially of taxpayers money – actually commit to it in writing – to a third level institution without any ministerial approval, and not even to inform the minister when he was doing media on the issue.
Watt rejected the suggested that he had approved the spending, stating that there is “no basis upon which I can approve spending for new areas of spending without the approval of the minister”.
“There was no spending here,” he said. “It was a commitment and the details had to be worked through and then the plan was that when the details had been finalised and we had a detailed set of proposals, that we would seek that formal sanction in the normal ways for the spending, which would be part of the 2023 estimates.”
Cullinane told Watt that it appeared he was planning to seek “retrospective approval” after committing to the funding.
“I think, with respect, you are not getting this at all and you lost the run of yourself,” he said.
Social Democrats co-founder Roisin Shortall also criticised what she described as “a serious mishandling of this proposal”.
“I believe you went beyond your authority and your power to do that,” she said.
Communication
Watt told the committee that the announcement of the secondment was “not communicated as clearly” as he would have liked and this led to confusion about how it was entered into and how the funding was organised.
“With the benefit of hindsight” they should have acted differently, he told the committee, but he did not “want news of the secondment to be leaked that the CMO was moving on when Covid-19 was still an issue”.
“We were bounced into making a statement earlier than we had hoped,” he said.
Watt told the committee that the open-ended secondment was to bring Dr Holohan to his retirement age in a similar arrangement to one that is already in place for Secretaries General.
“Absolutely, there are precedents there. And we broadly followed those precedents”, he said.
Watt said there are a number of people working in the Department of Health on secondment who have been there for several years and that in other secondment arrangements civil servants remain at the some grade or within the same salary bands.
Could you be persuaded?
Dr Holohan told committee members that once he could see how events were unfolding he thought it was important he make an early decision that he would not proceed in the role. He said this was done to ensure civil servants and politicians “would not continue to be diverted” by the controversy.
A number of members said they acknowledged the need for investment of this kind to improve the country’s public health infrastructure. Dr Holohan was asked by Fianna Fáil’s John Lahart whether the situation was “retrievable”.
“I’ve made it clear my ambition was to stay in the public service, to stay committed to the objective and ideals of public health, but just working in a different role, bringing what knowledge and expertise I might have or might have gained from the role that I previously held – not just in the course of the pandemic, but over the previous 15 years,” he said. “That was my that was my motivation. ”
Lahart asked if he could be “persuaded to think again”.
“Well nobody thus far has sought to persuade me, so that’s a hypothetical situation, with respect,” he replied.
Lahart asked him if “that was a ‘no’” and Dr Holohan clarified “that wasn’t a ‘no’”.
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