Taoiseach insists there’s no Donnelly and Holohan rift
TAOISEACH Micheál Martin was yesterday forced to dismiss claims of a rift between Health Minister Stephen Donnelly and the HSE’s Dr Tony Holohan.
Details were revealed yesterday of text exchanges between the minister and the Chief Medical Officer from last October and November, which suggested that their relationship was strained.
Correspondence released through Freedom of Information showed that Dr Holohan issued a stark warning in early November about the ‘weakness’ of the State’s border controls.
He said these frailties left him unable to assure the minister that Ireland was protected from new strains of the virus. It also revealed that on October 12, Dr Holohan texted Minister Donnelly to say that case numbers in Dublin were ‘up again as it has been over the weekend’ and said he would ‘urge caution on your public messaging re rates in Dublin’.
The previous day, Mr Donnelly had told RTÉ of ‘positive news’ in the capital where the R-number – the reproductive rate of the virus – stood at 1. The R-number is the reinfection rate of the virus. Once it goes below 1, total case numbers will start falling. He wrote on Twitter that the latest figures ‘suggest that transmission is slowing in Dublin’.
Mr Donnelly did not appear to respond to Dr Holohan’s text on that issue. When 11 days later, on
October 22, Dr Holohan texted Mr Donnelly to inform him the Rnumber for Dublin had gone up to between 1.2 and 1.3, the minister responded with a thumbs-up emoji. Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1’s This Week, the Taoiseach claimed that whilst there were ‘robust’ exchanges between the minister and the CMO, they had a very good relationship.
On the texts, he said this ‘was not the entirety of the engagement, the daily to-ing and fro-ing’. Pressed on the ‘terse’ exchanges between the Minister and the CMO, Mr Martin added: ‘It’s a good relationship.
‘Clearly at times it is frank and robust and that’s natural in times like these but it’s a good engagement.’ However, concerns are growing within Government over the political style of Mr Donnelly. The problem with Mr Donnelly, one minister noted, ‘is that he comes in like that consultant who thinks he is smarter than everyone else in the room and wants your job to pay for his job’. Another source noted that the minister ‘is utterly without political skills, he is a total Ugly Duckling’. Mr Donnelly is, another minister, noted: ‘Completely without allies – either in the medical profession or politics. He is Micheál’s creature, far more so than Norma [Foley] and when Micheál goes, he goes.’ Another source said Mr Donnelly has ‘a terrible propensity for ending up in damaging rows. He doesn’t learn either. He just gets into another one’. One Fianna Fáil grandee warned: ‘If there is one person you don’t get into trouble with, it is Tony Holohan. Tony is the national grandfather. But he is also a creature of the HSE. ‘You don’t get to the top of that pile without being rather wily.’