An Oireachtas committee is planning further scrutiny of the botched secondment of former chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan after a fractious hearing with the top civil servant in the Department of Health.
The department’s secretary general, Robert Watt, sought to draw a line under the controversy at yesterday’s meeting but committee members said it left things more “muddled” than beforehand.
Mayo Sinn Fein Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh says the secondment did not meet the criteria of being time-limited, with an upper limit of 5 years. Instead, it was proposed to be 10 years. This means we are talking about a sum of 20 million over that time.
Deputy Conway-Walsh says the real issue here is that the Minister for Health and the department of public expenditure and reform were sidestepped in the allocation of this money.
She has been giving more details to Midwest News...
