THE HEALTH SYSTEM SCANDALS THAT SHANE CORR HAS EXPOSED
SHANE CORR has a strong record of exposing financial irregularities in the health system and showing how vulnerable people have been illegally strong-armed and denied their rights by the State.
The disclosures that he has brought into the public domain in the past three years include:
■ In MARCH 2021, Mr Corr, together with RTÉ’s Prime Time, exposed how the Department of Health compiled secret tactical dossiers on litigants seeking support in the courts for their autistic children. This material was sourced directly and indirectly from confidential HSE services and files. Data routinely sourced by the department included private family details such as whether there was any crisis in the plaintiff’s life and whether there were marital difficulties.
■ In FEBRUARY 2022, Mr Corr provided recordings of top-level Department of Health finance meetings which revealed astonishing levels of financial dysfunction and mistrust in the health system. Examples included fake recruitment targets being presented to the public when insiders knew that they could not be met, and the need for accounting adjustments worth hundreds of millions to account for ‘fundamental errors’ in past accounts. expose various matters – including the extent of the State’s knowledge of the ‘systemic breakdown’ of care services for disabled citizens and how funds had not been properly accounted for at HSE-funded entities.
■ In NOVEMBER 2022, tapes disclosed to the MoS by Mr Corr laid bare the gruffly robust attitude of the Department of Health secretary-general, Robert Watt. In the recordings, Mr Watt described HSE spending during Covid as a ‘car crash’, while others said it was akin to a ‘drunk person on a Friday night at a cash point.’
■ In JANUARY 2023, Mr Corr made a protected disclosure to the MoS revealing how successive taoisigh and health ministers – including current Cabinet members – agreed a secret plan to hide the true €12bn scale of the State’s liability for illegal nursing home charges caused by poor legislation that had not been rectified. The aim of the move was to prevent massive payouts in cases the State knew it could not win. Mr Corr’s disclosure showed how thousands of families were wrongly charged for the care of their loved ones over a 30-year period. In many cases, vulnerable families suffered extreme hardship as a result of the illegal charges.
■ In FEBRUARY 2023, another disclosure from Mr Corr resulted in a further MoS exposé about a secret money-saving Cabinet memo that Leo Varadkar brought to Government when he was Minister for Health in 2015. Mr Varadkar proposed making savings of between €260m and €1bn from a draft law that would have made a series of cuts to Hepatitis C compensation measures; six months earlier, he had promised not to make any changes to the scheme. To stop an onslaught of people making claims before any changes were made, he proposed keeping the new Bill secret until it was published. Ultimately, the scheme was not altered – and Mr Varadkar’s proposal to do so remained a secret until Mr Corr’s intervention.
■ Also in FEBRUARY 2023,
Mr Corr made a further disclosure to the MoS which revealed how teenagers over the age of 16 and adults with mental illnesses are being denied free medication because the State is refusing to correct legislation it has known to be defective for more than a decade.