PATIENTS FED CHEESE MEANT FOR THE POOR
Hospital served free food from the EU to €1,000-a-night private patients
TONNES of EU food aid earmarked for the most deprived members of society was fed to hundreds of patients at a Government-funded hospital, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Cork’s Mercy University Hospital applied for the free food from 2010 to 2013 and used it to feed all of its patients, including those in private rooms paying €1,000 a night and also fee-paying public patients.
The hospital, which this week admit- ted to the Mail on Sunday that it was in the wrong – after a two month investigation started by us in April – also confirmed it only paid back the money to the Department of Agriculture this week.
That was only a day after we formally approached them looking for comment, hav- ing requested records of the scheme through the Freedom of Information Act from both the department, which oversaw the EU scheme locally, and the hospital.
The food – cheese, rice and butter – was
part of a €500m EU scheme to alleviate deprivation among the worst off in society.
The hospital used the free food it had acquired to make everything from cheese sauce to garlic butter for chicken kievs, mince pies, scones, risotto, lamb rogan josh, cheese and onion cakes, chicken wraps and chilli con carne.
However, under the rules of the Most Deprived Programme (MDP) the the food was meant to be distributed for free, not sold.
After operating without press attention for years, the EU’s scheme attracted controversy in 2010 when then Fianna Fáil agriculture minister Brendan Smith was accused of using it to make a publicityseeking promise in the wake of bad press for the government.
His comments on national radio drew ‘Let Them Eat Cheese’ headlines across the world given that Ireland was in the midst of recession at the time.
The headlines referred to Queen Marie Antoinette’s reputed – and often disputed – response of ‘Let them eat cake’ to starving Parisian
Recipients of food were ‘365 patients a day’
peasants who complained they had no bread to eat in the years preceding the French Revolution.
The free food programme, which has just been discontinued in favour of a new scheme, was administered in Ireland by the Department of Agriculture, which held records showing the food was being used for patients.
But until informed by the MoS this week the Department of Health was unaware the hospital had been using food from the charity scheme.
In recent years hundreds of Irish charities – among them St Vincent de Paul and Barnardo’s – shared in the €2.5m in foodstuffs allocated annually to Ireland under the scheme. But so too did Mercy University Hospital, Cork’s second largest hospital, which in 2012 also got €61m from the HSE and had a surplus of €1.8m.
Many of the patients served the food were private or otherwise fee paying. Itemised menus obtained by the MoS under the Freedom of Information Act show the EU food aid being served up to patients in every- thing from smoked bacon pasta and lasagne to salads, shepherd’s pie, quiche, omelettes and chile con carne. Record books – which the hospital must return to the Department of Agriculture – are supposed to confirm that each allocation of food aid was distributed to those who most needed it. But the hospital’s record books for every order between 2010 and 2013 simply state that the recipients of the f o o d were ‘365 patients per day’.
Because 30% of the hospital’s patients are private, it means that 109 private fee-paying patients a day were fed with the EU food aid each day that these supplies were used.
Private patients – through their insurance companies – pay €933 a night for a private room in the Mercy University Hospital plus a standard €75-a-night fee.
Public patients are also charged the €75 fee, which means that they too will have eaten and part-paid for EU food aid in recent years.
According to the hospital’s filed accounts, patient income amounted to €22m in 2012 and €20m in 2011, yet its budgets were effectively being subsidised by the EU food.
Throughout this period, hospital catering staff and administrators repeatedly signed sworn declarations in which they pledged that the free food was being distributed to ‘deprived persons’.
This week, in response to a detailed series of questions from the MoS, the hospital issued a statement to say it had made a mistake by participating in the food aid scheme and had now paid back all the money concerned.
‘As a city centre hospital treating mostly public patients, there was a belief historically that the hospital complied with the terms and conditions of the scheme,’ it said.
‘The hospital is now aware it does not satisfy the scheme’s criteria and whilst the earlier decision to participate was made in good faith, the hospital has ceased all participation in the scheme.’
The statement did not initially say when the money had been paid back.
But the MoS subsequently confirmed that it was refunded on Thursday – almost two months after we made our FoI requests and just a day after we informed the hospital of our intention to publish this weekend.