Beacon board clung to an opinion rather than the hard facts
CREDIT where it is due. The Government and HSE should be receiving considerable applause for at least one job done brilliantly – Ireland is doing better than almost any other country in delivering vaccines to its population, going way faster than had been projected or hoped.
There’s a race on now to get everybody from the age of 18 upwards vaccinated against Covid-19 as speedily as possible – and with good reason, as the number of new cases from the Delta variant rises quickly. Young people who have not been jabbed yet are lobbying pharmacists and doctors to do them as soon as possible and the HSE portal is inundated with requests too. It’s first come, first served now, to cope with the demand, which is all great news.
Vulnerable
All this activity shows great interest among the public and support for the vaccines, all of which increases our chances of defeating this dreaded illness.
We need as many people vaccinated as possible because if we don’t, even the vaccinated will be vulnerable to the illness, albeit hopefully not as seriously. The only problem is the availability of vaccines. Then let’s get to the teenagers.
Cast your mind back to the early months of this year though, when the vaccines were first available but in short supply. Correctly, strict rules were set down as to who would first get the vaccines. The most vulnerable first and healthcare workers. Everyone else would have to wait their turn. As it had to be.
Which was why there was uproar and outrage when this newspaper revealed a shocking case of people being vaccinated out of turn.
It wasn’t the fault of the teachers at St Gerard’s junior school in Bray, Co. Wicklow that 20 of them got vaccines prematurely courtesy of the privately-owned Beacon Hospital in Dublin, just because its chief executive Michael Cullen sent his children there. The teachers were led to believe, incorrectly, that their jabs had HSE approval.
But it most certainly was Cullen’s responsibility. The whole episode smacked of elitism, of a powerful person using his position to dispense patronage.
Correctly, the nation was outraged; vaccine delivery was not supposed to be allocated according to who knew who.
However, Cullen was never in danger of losing his job. The wagons were circled to protect him. The board of the Beacon didn’t suspend or fire him. The matter was referred to an independent investigation, buying time to allow the outrage to subside. The review was conducted by someone regarded as one of the country’s outstanding legal minds, solicitor-turned-business consultant Eugene McCague.
Some details of his report – not the full thing, which was withheld for confidentiality and privacy reasons – were published on Monday.
It should be said that McCague appears to have done the usual absolutely brilliant job in compiling his report into the controversy. What we have seen appears to be thorough and forensic. Few stones seem to have been left unturned. He does not attempt to varnish the facts in Cullen’s favour. In fact most of those we have seen are very unfavourable to his actions. He broke all the rules and guidelines.
If that was all that is in McCague’s report then Cullen’s continued holding of the position would have been very hard to justify. But then McCague threw in an opinion or an interpretation that also served as a lifesaver for Cullen. He said that he was ‘satisfied’ Cullen acted in ‘good faith’ in what he did. That is not a fact. It was entirely subjective on McCague’s part, an opinion, an assessment and a judgment.
Growth
But the board of the hospital seized on this and highlighted it as justification to exonerate Cullen, still a substantial shareholder in an entity controlled by businessman Denis O’Brien.
Cullen did the wrong thing but for the right reasons. He did it for fear of vaccines going to waste (which may be understandable) but incorrectly picked the wrong people to get them. What will remain unknown to us – because it was not in the published bits of the report – were the reasons why he selected the Bray school as his recipient. Nor do we know if it included details of any other people who may have received vaccines out of turn.
The Beacon explained its decision to retain Cullen with this statement: ‘Michael has provided the hospital with strong leadership and vision, resulting in substantial growth and expansion of patient services. We are confident that Beacon Hospital will continue to provide exceptional patient care into the future under his guidance.’
In other words, the board is happy with the financial returns being generated under Cullen’s leadership and it’s not going to allow media, political or public criticism interfere with that. And we can probably assume that it feels that time has proven to be a great healer and that the public’s interest in all of this has moved on.