The Department of Health struggled to work out how to spend 800m just a week after being given the largest budget in its history, a whistleblower has claimed.
The whistleblower, a Department of Health employee, has prepared a seventh disclosure for release, focusing on meetings in and around Budget 2021, which saw an extra 4bn added to the health budget, the largest budget increase in the history of the State.
However, the disclosure, seen by the Irish Examiner, said that just over a week after the Budget was voted through by the Dáil, health officials did not know how to spend 800m.
The document says that on October 14, 2020, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly briefed the finance unit in the department on the upcoming Budget.
It says Mr Donnelly said that "for the first time" the department had adequate funding to do what it set out to do but said that not everything would work and that the department would "adjust as it needs to".
The disclosure says that one official told a finance unit meeting eight days later that "every single person that we spoke to, expressed concern that the HSE wouldn't spend money on what it was for, and would end up in the black hole".
Another is quoted as saying that the department did not trust the HSE and would instead give the executive one-third of its funding.
A third meeting in December focused on talks around a new public health consultant contract in which an official noted that Mr Donnelly and his advisors "had been inundated with...
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