The Department of Health has had a torrid few months.
Between the furore over the ill-fated secondment of chief medical officer Tony Holohan to Trinity College and more recently the controversy regarding the ownership of the new national maternity hospital, the department has been fighting fires on what feels like a constant basis.
Meanwhile, the department’s secretary general Robert Watt[/url=, he of the 81,000 salary hike who was brought in to rejuvenate how the department functions, has become something of a media celebrity, rarely out of the headlines — a situation anathema to the senior public servant, who is supposed to operate anonymously behind the wizard’s curtain.
The constant stream of controversy has actually helped the department’s cause in one way however — for as Donald Trump has shown, the human mind can only process so much media coverage at any one time.
Cast your mind back just three months and a matter easily as consequential as that of the Holohan secondment was unfolding. That particular issue had more to do with the relations between the HSE and its ostensible supervisor, the department.
If you can’t remember, I don’t blame you. A series of disclosures by a departmental whistleblower alleged the relationship between the two bodies was at a historically low ebb.
Shane Corr, who had in 2021 brought to public attention allegations that the department was involved in collating personal information regarding children with autism for use as leverage in...
An Orange County man has pleaded guilty to submitting nearly $270 million in fraudulent claims over an 11-month span to Medi-Cal for expensive prescription drugs containing generic ingredients tha...