Watt is accused of ‘arrogance’ over CMO’s Trinity role
THE secretary general of the Department of Health has been accused of ‘breathtaking arrogance’ and ‘seriously mishandling’ the secondment of Dr Tony Holohan to Trinity College.
Members of the Oireachtas health committee also requested that legal advice be sought over a letter between top civil servant Robert Watt and Trinity College, in which Mr Watt ‘commits’ to providing €2million in annual funding for the nowabandoned secondment without approval from Health Minister Stephen Donnelly.
Mr Watt yesterday repeatedly denied that he signed off on the funding. ‘There’s no basis upon which I can approve spending for new areas of spending without the approval of the minister – I don’t have that authority,’ he said. ‘The plan was, when the details had been finalised and we had a detailed set of proposals, that we would seek formal sanction in the normal way for the spending.’
However, Fine Gael TD Colm Burke, who is a practising solicitor, raised concerns that Mr Watt wrote a letter to Trinity College provost Linda Doyle on March 16 about the secondment and didn’t mention that the agreement was subject to sign-off by Mr Donnelly. ‘Legally, I’m telling you, that you sent an offer out. They accept the offer. That’s a contract and now you’re saying to me
‘Absolute obligation to inform the minister’
that it was still subject to ministerial approval and yet there was no reference in that letter to ministerial approval,’ Mr Burke said.
Fine Gael senator Martin Conway later requested that the committee seek legal advice from a parliamentary legal adviser in relation to the letter.
Citing the letter to Trinity, Sinn Féin’s David Cullinane and Social Democrat co-leader Róisín Shortall accused Mr Watt of committing the department to ‘substantial’ multi-annual funding worth more than €20million over a ten-year period without Mr Donnelly’s approval. Mr Cullinane said it was ‘breathtaking arrogance’ that Mr Watt would commit €2million a year in funding to provide for Dr Holohan’s role, while the secretary general said the spending had not been approved as the details had to be worked through.
‘You cannot say that you’re going to seek retrospective approval once you are committing in writing €2million a year to an outside body – you had an absolute obligation to inform the Minister for Health. You failed to do so,’ Mr Cullinane said.
Dr Holohan, who appeared before the committee alongside Mr Watt, said he was not annoyed with the secretary general and the department about the way the secondment had been handled. ‘I never felt that there was anything other than full support for both the concept of this,’ he said.
Dr Holohan added that, when he saw the ‘concerns’ about his secondment, he decided to make a ‘clean and early’ decision not to accept the role.