NPHET’s ‘big reveals’ will be stopped under new rules stopped under new rules
THE Government will change how it interacts with NPHET after a series of recent controversies.
It comes as senior civil servants told the Irish Mail on Sunday they believe they are being ‘scapegoated’ for a regressing Government Covid-19 policy, which was described by one official as being increasingly ‘incoherent’.
However, sources at the top of Government insist party leaders were not warned by NPHET of the recently proposed 5pm hospitality closing time at a meeting two days before it was made public.
A senior Government source told the MoS: ‘No actual times were discussed at the meeting.’
The practice of NPHET revealing Covid restrictions like, in the words of one Cabinet minister, ‘a tablet being handed down from the mount’, will be ended as part of the communications overhaul.
However, a new form of managing the pandemic will only be instituted after the current Omicron surge abates.
Revelations in our sister newspaper, The Irish Daily Mail, of the proposed 5pm closure for pubs and restaurants caused a revolt among Government backbenchers and senators. The Government subsequently changed the hospitality closing time to 8pm. Some ministers were only informed of the plan through the media.
‘No actual times were discussed at that meeting,’ a Government source said of a meeting Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar and Green leader Eamon Ryan had with Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan on Tuesday, December 14. ‘So how you could then, two days later, decide to bring proposals to Government of this 5pm thing? This was a catastrophic collapse in internal Government communication.’
Cabinet members believe Health Minister Stephen Donnelly and his department secretary general Robert Watt must institute reform of interactions with NPHET. Ministers have questioned why a Cabinet subcommittee and full Cabinet meeting –
even via video link – cannot be held immediately after a NPHET meeting that recommends restrictions. This reform forms a central plank of the proposed review.
One minister told the MoS: ‘It is naive to think in the modern media age that a letter, which is in fact an email, from the CMO to the Minister for Health is going to stay confidential for 24 hours or 48 hours.
‘There was a complacency born of the belief that the crisis was over. An ad hoc arrangement was allowed to drift.’
Ministers want to reform NPHET and institute a long-held desire to reduce its public role. There was dismay among Government figures that Dr Holohan, right, spoke to RTÉ, contradicting what he characterised as a claim in this newspaper that a NPHET meeting was to be held on December 30. However, the MoS made no such statement and had instead stated the next official NPHET meeting was scheduled for January 6.
A source said: ‘Rather than attacking the media perhaps it would be better if we instituted basic, modern reforms to how we do our business.’