CIVIL SERVANTS’ STINGING VERDICT ON HEALTH CHIEFS
Whistleblower tapes of budget meetings reveal scathing views on Watt, Donnelly and Reid
RECORDINGS of Department of Health budget meetings reveal a series of disparaging opinions held by senior public servants about the health executives responsible for the department’s €24bn budget.
Tapes obtained by the Irish Mail on Sunday lift the lid on how department officials perceived Health Ministser Stephen Donnelly and his now-secretary-general Robert Watt.
In the recordings – provided to the MoS via a protected disclosure by the whistleblower Shane Corr – public servants also express concern about unsanctioned spending by then HSE chief executive Paul Reid.
In extracts from the recordings, Department of Health officials:
■ Compare uncontrolled HSE spending during the pandemic to ‘a drunk person on a Friday night at a cashpoint’;
■ Describe Mr Watt as ‘like a very
powerful but clever four-year-old’ who likes to engage in theatrics during negotiations;
■ Mock Minister Donnelly’s intention to secure an extra €4bn in funding for health, with one official joking he would get ‘a black eye’ if he challenged Mr Watt;
■ Compare HSE spending when the Covid-19 emergency hit as a ‘€1.2bn car crash’;
■ Describe now former HSE CEO Paul Reid as being ‘like a cat on a hot tin roof’ in his attempts to secure funding, with one official saying the ex-HSE boss ‘seems to be blithely spending hundreds of millions of euro’ on procurement deals ‘without so much as a buy or leave’.
The recordings are of two Department of Health (DOH) finance unit meetings that took place during the summer of 2020.
‘Paul Reid was like a cat on a hot tin roof’
One of the recordings is of a weekly planning meeting that took place on July 13, just two weeks after Mr Donnelly’s appointment at the end of June that year.
During the meeting, DOH officials discuss a belief expressed by the minister that he could secure an extra €4bn for his health budget from Mr Watt.
At the time, Mr Watt was secretary general at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER).
His subsequent transfer to the Department of Health was accompanied by a controversial pay rise that bumped his salary up to €294,000, making him the country’s highest-paid civil servant.
The senior civil servant has been involved in a number of public controversies in recent years and he has openly acknowledged his ‘combative’ nature.
One official attending the meeting spoke of Mr Donnelly’s view that Mr Watt had been miscalculating health budgets for years.
The idea that the minister would challenge Mr Watt in this fashion is greeted with laughter.
‘There’s a certain way of dealing with Robert. He’s like a very powerful but clever four-year-old,’ one official tells his colleagues, before joking the encounter could result in a black eye for the minister.
The official goes on to describe Mr Watt’s tough reputation saying: ‘Like, Robert has lost the plot for the most ridiculous things, like, you know...’
Another official describes an incident in which Mr Watt gave a loud dressing down to the thenDepartment of Health secretarygeneral, Jim Breslin, during an estimates meeting.
‘He ended up bringing Jim outside the room, but it was almost like he was being bawled out behind the curtain because, like, there was no point in leaving the room because you could hear him screaming anyway,’ the official recalls.
‘He might as well have just done it because we all know and stuff. It’s not like he brought him into a soundproofed room and started yelling at him there.’
Another official describes Mr Watt as ‘real theatrical’, and outlined how he employed brinkmanship strategies, including one incident when he pretended to walk out of a late-night meeting during the 2019 nurses’ strike.
Others appear to mock Mr Donnelly’s intention to secure an extra €4bn from the combative Mr Watt.
‘God bless him,’ one says.
‘What a productive first two weeks,’ another quips.
Mr Donnelly declined to respond directly when asked about the comments made by his department officials. Instead, a spokesperson for the minister provided a statement, pointing out that the health budget ‘climbed from €17.9bn in 2020 to €22.7bn in 2023 (excluding Covid-19 funding). This represents a €4.8bn increase.’
The second recording is of Department of Health officials preparing for a meeting of the Government’s high-level Health Budget Oversight Group (HBOG).
Convened during the pandemic, HBOG meetings were intended to ensure financial governance as Covid-related spending rocketed.
These were attended by finance officials from the HSE, DPER and DOH.
During their pre-HBOG meeting on June 10, 2020, DOH officials discuss a range of concerns, but in a manner intended to be kept from the public eye.
‘This isn’t for FOI,’ one official makes clear when describing the HSE’s spending approach.
‘But it’s kind of like a drunk person on a Friday night at a cashpoint.’
For a large part of the meeting, the officials discuss the HSE’s outof-control expenditure, which they describe as a ‘large black hole’ and ‘a €1.2bn car crash’.
One official observes: ‘There’s no actual governance structure in place and that’s how we’ve ended up with this.’
The officials speak of writing to the HSE with warnings.
‘I’m really concerned about this now. I don’t know what we can do,’ one says.
‘We put it to them in no uncertain terms yesterday. We won’t be entertaining any cash acceleration requests… that have a procurement element to them at this stage.
‘What we don’t want them doing is to spend the money on procurement and then say, no money left for payroll again. We’ve warned them about that too.’
A central issue discussed during the meeting is a May 2020 letter from Paul Reid to then DOH secretary-general Jim Breslin on May 12, 2020, in which he advises the department that PPE [personal protective equipment] for health staff could cost in excess of €1bn annually.
But in the recorded pre-HBOG meeting, the DOH officials appear aghast at the fact that the money had apparently been spent
‘You could hear Watt screaming anyway’
‘It was our job to identify it and stop it’
prior to the letter being sent.
One official said: ‘The problem is that Paul Reid’s letter in May – as I recall certainly the vibe I got off it – was this was future tense.
‘Actually, at that time, it was clearly past tense. This was money spent and committed to being spent.
‘There’s still no sign of a sanction request,’ a colleague points out. ‘Even a retrospective one for what they’ve already spent.’
One official comments that Mr Reid was ‘like a cat on a hot tin roof’ in relation to an earlier sanction request for €208m, ‘yet seems to be blithely spending hundreds of millions of euro on other procurement deals without so much as a buy your leave’.
‘They’d already spent the billion euro’
Another comments: ‘This carryon – I think everyone is really cheesed off with the fact that, obviously when Paul Reid wrote
in, they’d already spent the billion euro.’
Mr Reid, who has since left the HSE, serving his final day on September 30 last, declined to respond directly to the exchanges when contacted by the MoS this week. Instead, he asked that our queries be referred to the HSE.
A spokesperson for the HSE said: ‘The Department of Health in the past has addressed the publication of various alleged recordings of conversations between Department of Health officials and we have nothing to add.’
Whistleblower Shane Corr said he felt compelled to go public with the recordings and other material after the DOH rebuffed his concerns internally.
‘My many requests for a disclosures process in the department have failed. I told Mr Watt in writing last summer that I was trying to help him, but that without a disclosure process, I would have to go to the media, which I duly did.
‘In spite of being vindicated by recordings, the department has accused me of being a conspiracy theorist,’ he said.
‘Without the recordings… my disclosures would never have seen the light of day.’
Mr Corr said he became aware of ‘serial financial mismanagement and misreporting, as well as extraordinary waste in the health system,’ since joining the Department of Health team in January 2020.
He had previously worked as an auditor of public finances at the Comptroller and Auditor General’s office for more than 16 years. ‘It was our job to identify it and stop it,’ Mr Corr said of the poor practices the Department of Finance team encountered. ‘But often we were told that these discussions were “not for FOI”, “not for minuting”, “not to go outside the room”, or that “Chatham House Rules [anonymity designed to increase openness of discussion] apply.”’
Because of this, Mr Corr said ‘very serious financial issues became hidden from DPER, the Government and the public’.
Mr Corr said matters such as the personal management style of the secretary-general and Minister Donnelly are also in the public interest to reveal.
‘I was shocked at what I heard, and I believed that Mr Watt should have been informed and given an opportunity to defend himself,’ he said.
Last night a spokesperson for the Department of Health said it was ‘aware of alleged recordings being circulated’.
The spokesperson said it was ‘grossly unfair’ and not in the public interest to report on private opinions aired by participants in internal DOH meetings.
‘No official of the Department of Health has given consent to be recorded while carrying out their duties or would have had any awareness that another party was routinely and covertly making recordings of their internal discussions,’ they added.
‘The work of the Department and its officials with the HSE on improving the transparency around financial matters is clearly in the public interest,’ the spokesperson said.
The department also acknowledged that there are ‘many legacy issues across the health service to be addressed’.
‘The Department of Health and the HSE work closely together to manage the health service and, through Sláintecare, implement the much-needed reform to deliver a better health service for the public.
‘This working relationship, characterised by mutual respect, is professional and constructive,’ the spokesperson said.
Addressing the concerns about PPE spending, the spokesperson said Covid planning, at a time of uncertainty, ‘included consideration of expenditure on some contingency scenarios which were ultimately mitigated by the effectiveness and success of the wider Covid-19 response’.
‘Ireland’s Covid-19 response had to scale rapidly in highly challenging circumstances and in doing so needed to appropriately balance clinical, patient safety and financial imperatives,’ the spokesperson added.