The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been advised to ignore all correspondence from a Department of Health whistleblower due to the way in which he gathered his information, the Irish Examiner has learned.
The Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers (OPLA), the in-house legal team for the Oireachtas, has told the committee that the various disclosures made by whistleblower Shane Corr in recent months should be “demoted”, or stricken from the record.
Confirming the news, PAC chair Brian Stanley said the committee “received legal advice to demote it, and the committee considered it important that it’s demoted”.
It is understood the issue with the disclosures made by Mr Corr chiefly revolves around the fact he made recordings of senior-level departmental meetings without the attendees' consent, and then shared those recordings with the Business Post newspaper.
Mr Stanley said that “each piece of correspondence would be examined on its own merit, and is only demoted when the legal advice is to do so”.
'Serious' issues raised
However, he said that the issues raised in the disclosures remain “quite serious” and that PAC “has to be cognisant of the issues raised, wherever they come from”.
Mr Corr, in a series of disclosures, had suggested a degree of animus between the Department of Health and the HSE, that “fake” and “batshit” recruitment targets had been put in place for the health service, that the HSE had been unable to account for where much of its 2020 budget had been...
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