‘The civil service is a club and if you go outside the dressing room, it’s guaranteed you will be vilified and disowned’
Exclusive interview with Shane Corr, the whistleblower who has blown the lid on HSE waste and mismanaged spending
IN MOST respects, Shane Corr is like any other guy. He’s a Liverpool Football Club supporter, a Dublin GAA season ticket holder and likes a pint of the black stuff.
If anything, you could describe him as run-of-the-mill – a trait often unfairly associated with his chosen trade of accountancy.
His favourite movie is The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and when not watching spaghetti Westerns his idea of a good time falls far short of adventurous.
‘A treat would be a train trip to somewhere I’ve never been,’ he tells the Irish Mail on Sunday.
Another clue to his mindset is the way in which he became a vegetarian at just 20, dutifully compiling a spreadsheet to catalogue the air miles of his fruit and veg.
‘I copied in the map of the world into the Excel sheet. And I started highlighting the countries,’ he recalls.
‘I remember as a kid we used to see the map of the world with the British Empire coloured in, and it was pretty appalling the number of countries they had managed to be in charge of.
‘This map I had, within two weeks, was
‘We let the country down by not making enough of these issues’
far bigger and greater than the British Empire ever was. It was extraordinary.’
He may be forensic-minded and not particularly adventurous with his pastimes, but Shane Corr is far from ordinary.
He is certainly not like most of the 100,000 or so civil servants in the health system. of holding his tongue when he saw something untoward, he spoke up. Then, each time the system closed ranks to protect itself, he spoke a little louder. In the end, he had no option left but the nuclear one. So he went public. Now, Mr Corr is something he never thought he would be. He is a whistleblower.
And he is proud of it.
Raised in Dublin’s Raheny, his grandfathers on both sides were civil servants and his father was an accountant. It is no surprise then that his mother always encouraged him to enter public service.
After a spell studying in DIT, a stint on fruit farms in Germany and time served at several private accountancy practices, that’s just what he did in January 2001.
‘Getting a job at the office of the Comptroller & Auditor General was probably the most elated feeling
I’ve ever had – including getting married and watching my favourite team win All-Irelands,’ he says.
‘That was a great moment for me, and it was exactly the job I wanted.’
The forensic nature of the work, auditing Government departments and public bodies, suited him. If anything, he was too good at digging down to discover abuses others wanted to keep hidden.
‘It was from the get-go, and it was throughout the time that I was auditing,’ he says of the financial irregularities he began to encounter as soon as he joined the C&AG.
‘Within the space of a few weeks, I would have seen things that I would have thought should be reported to the Public Accounts Committee. There were things I thought merited further investigation or merited highlighting in a different way – or I thought that the public should have been informed of.’
In one instance, he unearthed correspondence that the outcome of a Government contract worth hundreds of millions of euro may have been fixed to suit a particular bidder. He brought the matter to the attention of his superiors and a senior former civil servant was hired to compile a report.
But nothing happened.
Instead, Mr Corr was eventually told the issue had ‘fallen between the cracks and the floorboards’.
‘To me, ultimately, there were times when we let the country down by not making enough of these issues,’ he says.
He resolved that the only thing to do was to ‘dig deeper and to object more and to stand over yourself in a better way’.
But, as he soon realised, there were consequences to his actions.
‘The civil service is a club,’ he says, ‘and the club doesn’t like people going outside of the dressing room. They’re just not geared up for that to happen.’
Since Mr Corr began to go public with his concerns, long-term friends and colleagues, some of whom used to accompany him weekly to Dublin matches, have vanished.
‘You can be guaranteed you’ll be vilified and disowned,’ he says of the experience. ‘But the important thing is to get the stuff out there. That’s the target. The target isn’t to make friends or keep friends, the target is to get the stuff out there.’
Mr Corr is complimentary about many of his colleagues saying many are ‘hard-working and conscientious civil servants’.
But he is damning of the system they work in.
‘There would have been a lot of people in the civil service who got into well-paid jobs pretty quickly and were very comfortable knowing that they had a pension and they had great sick leave entitlements. And they weren’t going to speak badly of the club. The club is pretty united in that you don’t talk badly of the club. It’s an Irish form of omerta,’ he says.
A phrase that one boss in particular favoured – ‘rank has its privileges’ – encapsulates this.
‘It doesn’t matter terribly in the civil service what your abilities are,’ he explains. ‘People rose though the ranks almost by a timetable and not by merit. A lot of people would merit it but you didn’t have to merit it to progress.’
There was something else Mr Corr noticed as he checked payroll and employee files as a C&AG auditor.
Many employee files would contain issues they had tried in good faith to raise with their superiors.
‘You would see recommendations going back to these people reminding them they would be better off thinking of their children or looking after their homes or considering their next promotion competition,’ Mr Corr remembers.
‘It was as blatant as that,’ he says. ‘Civil servants know these pressure points will be brought to bear.’
And so most never go as far as Mr Corr did. But even he may never have gone public had he not encoun
tered what he calls the ‘mind-blowing, sheer madness’ of the health system.
In January 2020, he was promoted to Higher Executive Officer rank and randomly allocated a new role in the Department of Health’s finance unit.
Initially, he was delighted. But then, in his very first meeting with the HSE he encountered an organisation that had requested additional funds without proper explanation.
‘The guys couldn’t explain why they needed this,’ he recalls. ‘I mean, it was more then a third of a billion euros that they got as additional expenditure and they couldn’t explain why they needed it. They couldn’t explain if they’d spent it or not – or what they’d spent it on. And they couldn’t really advance any explanation as to why they couldn’t explain any of this.
‘I was staggered also that nobody seemed to know how this was going to turn out. I still can’t get my head around it – that idea that accountants asked for more money and then can’t tell you what was done with it.’
Sadly, the problem was nothing new as one letter Mr Corr came across demonstrated. That 2016 letter, from the chair of the HSE’s audit committee to then-CEO Tony O’Brien, estimated that the HSE’s poor financial governance practices was resulting in more than €100m being lost annually. As he read the correspondence four years later, Mr Corr was aghast that nothing had changed.
‘Nobody paid a blind bit of notice to the guy, and if they had acted on what he was urging – which was basically just looking for reliable financial control at the HSE – so much money wouldn’t have been wasted.
‘The greatest sin [is] to be told what’s going wrong, and then to be given a way of fixing it, and then not fixing it but saying that you had fixed it. I mean what’s the point of auditors? What’s the point of anything?’
Initially, Mr Corr made his disclosures internally, and a barrister was appointed to compile a report about his concerns. But once the report was completed he was not allowed to see it unless he signed a nondisclosure agreement.
He refused, on the basis that this would allow his concerns to be swept under the carpet as they had been at the C&AG.
And then Covid-19 came along, amplifying the problems tenfold.
Everywhere Mr Corr looked during the pandemic, he was encountering the same unresolved problems. Worse still, the civil service was often intent on hiding them completely.
‘Frequently we were told that discussions we were having weren’t for FOI [Freedom of Information]. They weren’t to go outside the room, they weren’t to be minuted.
‘As well as that there were times when we were told that something wrong was going to happen. We knew it was going to happen and we were going to look the other way. It was an active and frequent part of work in the Department of Health.
‘Every single week there was an issue where I had to ask myself had public financial procedures been broken here? These procedures are underpinned by the Constitution and the laws of the State. It’s not just some book that you look at occasionally to see if you’re doing the right thing.’
And in the health service, not doing the right thing has life-and-death consequences. It results in scandals such as the Kerry CAMHS drug misdiagnosis fiasco and the smear test controversy that this week took the life of campaigner and mother-of-two Vicky Phelan.
Mr Corr says: ‘When things go wrong in finance and budgeting and planning in the Department of Health it affects everything and it affects outcomes all around the country. It would be incomprehensible for a private sector firm to behave like this – and for the person responsible to remain in their job.’
But in the health service that’s precisely what happens.
Today, the only person out of work as a result of the scandals he has exposed is Mr Corr himself, who is suspended on full pay.
‘I’m still a civil servant,’ he says. ‘A civil servant who’d like to go back to work. That’s how I see myself. I’m a civil servant without work. Really, my ambition is to be a civil servant. That’s what I’ve spent the last 21 years doing and that’s what I want to keep doing.’
Despite the personal sacrifices – he describes being ditched by his friends as the worst day of his life – he insists he’s content with his
‘Frequently we were told discussions weren’t to go beyond the room’
Somebody should have said: ‘Shane, tell us everything’
decision to turn whistleblower.
‘I’m happy,’ he says. ‘I’m very happy I did it.’
He said last week’s acknowledgement from Health Minister Stephen Donnelly that his actions were in the public interest, are heartening.
But he still wants the Department of Health to engage with his concerns. ‘What should have happened is, somebody should have called me in and said, “Shane, tell us everything.”
‘I still hope that will happen. I still hope that the department will come and talk to me and listen to what I have to say and look at my transcripts and make it a part of their own record.’
Most of all, though, he is determined to reach out to others who are aware of matters of public interest that are being covered up internally. ‘I’m not a victim here,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to be a victim. Bad things have happened to me in that they sort of trashed my reputation a bit. But what I’ve learned from other whistleblowers now is that we need to present whistleblowers in a very positive light and to action other people into coming out with their stories.’
Rather than being presented as a victim, Mr Corr wants to be known as someone who ‘wanted to do something, knew the consequences and still went ahead’.
He said this is important for those who are ‘wavering or afraid to come into the light’ to understand.
‘It’s very, very important that whistleblowers come forward,’ he says, adding that none of the other whistleblowers he’s met have regretted coming forward.
‘I would encourage them to do it and to get the right support, because the alternative is for things to remain as they are.’