These tapes give insight to the health crisis. They are in the public interest
OVER the past four weeks, the Irish Mail On Sunday has been presenting our readers with a series of explosive revelations from the heart of the dysfunctional management of the health system, a service on which we now spend €24bn a year.
We have revealed repeated issues between the Department of Health and the HSE and how both sides deal with key budgetary questions or issues, an essential role of journalism given the eyewatering amount of taxpayers’ money at stake.
The revelations come from Department of Health whistleblower Shane Corr, who repeatedly tried to bring these issues to the attention of management. Only when this proved a fruitless and thankless task did he bring his concerns to the media.
This week, we reveal recordings made in two Department of Health budget meetings which back up the whistleblower’s contention that significant question marks over how the HSE was spending money were not being raised at appropriate levels with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.
The recordings also show an endemic understanding amongst the civil service that the system as it works depends heavily on issues of personal management style.
We have the then secretarygeneral of DPER, now secretary-general in Health, Robert Watt, described as someone who engages in theatrics and as ‘a very powerful but clever fouryear-old’. We have then newlyappointed Health Minister Stephen Donnelly’s genuine – and ultimately successful – attempt to secure additional funding for his department dismissed in a patronising fashion by his own officials. We have criticism of the spending controls employed by the HSE during the Covid pandemic likened to the actions of ‘a drunk person on a Friday night at a cashpoint’.
When these revelations were put to the Department of Health, they claimed – not unfairly – that no one in the room had consented to the recordings. That Mr Corr felt the need to go to the grave extent of recording his colleagues while they were expressing unfiltered opinions in the workplace should show how desperate he was that his concerns were being ignored, or not being brought to the attention of his departmental superiors.
We do not publish these tapes lightly, but journalism quite rightly has been given an exemption from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to allow us to process information such as we publish today. Yet the Department of Health, when presented with the transcripts, has insisted that large swathes of them ‘obviously’ fail the public interest test.
If the Department was more interested in doing its job than it appears to be in attempting to block us doing ours, perhaps the almost one million people on waiting lists in this country would have better hope this morning of seeing a doctor or a consultant.
It will not make for easy reading for those officials who have been caught out speaking their minds. We understand also it might not be gratifying for some of our top health chiefs to read what people they work with think of some of their antics.
Nonetheless, we believe that transparency and accountability are key to reforming a health service that is now so far beyond dysfunction, that it will instinctively attack the messenger rather than absorb the key messages it should be hearing.