Dr Tony Holohan will not take up controversial role at Trinity College and will retire as Chief Medical Officer https://jrnl.ie/5734610

33 comments

  2. No one defended the appointment and now he’s not taking up the role. It’s as close to an admission of cronyism as we’ll get. Someone else in government should be held to account for this, it wasn’t just Tony acting alone

  6. Just old fashioned taking care of a boy. Zero problem if we had a competition and he won, but this “take care of him” shite has to stop.

  7. Gov should not be offering jobs in TCD. TCD is supposed to be a federation of independent self governing academics.

  9. I’ll get downvoted to oblivion for this but I am scratching my head to figure out the outrage behind this.

    He’s an employee of a public body, getting paid to do a secondment as an employee of what’s ultimately another public body that still received most of it’s funding from the Irish government. All that would change is under what ledger his salary is being accounted under.

    €200k is about what a top lecturer with his experience would get at a top university. It’s a drop in the fucking bucket of the Irish purse, it’s 0.001% of tax receipted collected over the last 3 months. The government pisses exponentially more money up the wall on far less useful things.

    He’s Ireland’s top doctor who took the helm during an unprecedented public health crisis. There’s only a few dozen people in the world who’s been though what he has. It’s a small price to pay for even the chance that we might distill valuable lessons about public health leadership learnt from a once in a generation pandemic from him. Better yet that an Irish educational institution and the next generation of Irish public health leaders will benefit from his experience.

    Instead now he’s probably going to go off to teach in the States or the UK who’ll reap the benefits of the knowledge we should rightfully be getting because our country’s public so uncomfortable about public figures earning money.

  10. Fucking called it!
    I said there was no way he could keep it now at work and everyone said I was mad, sure he already had it.
    But there’s just too much heat on the dept of health for this kind of stuff at the moment.

  11. It’s a pity because we should be looking to attract talented people to important jobs but as a society we should demand transparency in Government. Transparency in the higher echelons of civil service and also transparency in local government where we learned recently they have to answer to nobody.

  14. He should be in prison, Ireland is hands down one of the most politically corrupt countries on the planet.

  15. It does feel like we’ve potentially shot ourselves in the foot in this case. The overzealous demand for transparency and accountability has resulted in our universities losing out on arguably a real asset.

    Like him or not, there’s probably no better person to be passing on the knowledge he’s gained over the past two years to future generations of medical students and public health students. All for the sake of saving a couple €100k, we may well regret this in 30 years time when the next pandemic arrives and the next generation of public health doctors missed out on the valuable lessons from inside public health department in Ireland.

    Cost of everything and value of nothing comes to mind.

    While I personally didn’t always agree with his decisions during the pandemic, I don’t think anyone could argue that the trinity medical school could find a more suitable candidate to lecture in Pandemic Management.

  17. I am very sad to see this happen.

    Think what you will of what Dr Holohan done during the pandemic but the numbers speak for themselves. We were not the worst by any interpretation.

    We also need to plan for the future. The Asian countries that planned after SARS and MERS did a lot better during this pandemic than others. That was exactly what he was going to be doing and now because of media frenzy and jealousy he’s going to retire.

    Of course I don’t expect he will actually retire. He’s going to take a career break and some big private sector consultancy is going to hire him on five times this money and the Irish public either won’t get the benefit or will be paying the consultancy rates for his time.

    Sigh. I hoped Ireland was better than this.

  19. The headline in a couple of weeks will be that Houlihan has taken up a position lecturing in the US or in the UK.

  21. A pity after his good leadership through the pandemic, but the way this appointment was handled was very disappointing.

  22. I’m ok with it except the open ended secondment ? Now that’s a fucking fiddle , maybe a 2,3,5 year but he could fall back into the HSE and perhaps keep the two posts then which could be the plan

  23. Remember this on the next cycle of pandemics… Because we won’t (because we’re Irish) have anything in place…not will we have a system drafted in place for it by someone with a level of expertise in understanding how to manage both the demands of a government and a population.
    There’s no cronyism is development of a lessons learned / evidence based system by the leading expert in that system.

  26. So TCD didn’t actually want him. Weren’t willing to actually pay him. Looks like a big waste of money was just prevented. Good news

  27. It was an odd one…if he was on pretty much the equivalence of secondment? trinity should surely have been paying his wages…

  29. And that’s why we can’t have anything nice in this country.

    I’ve a strong sense this is purely media driven also and politicians just reacting? Nobody really cares, if anything the man deserves getting a cushy or well paid role after the service he has given. Who gives a fuck if its the HSE or Trinity paying, its all tax payer money either way.

  30. As a new entrant to the Civil Service I would just like to say to the senior staff. Stop being cunts I want to earn a living while doing something meaningful you are tarnishing my career with cronyism and all the other carry on.

    Again stop being CUNTS..

  31. I think this is shooting ourselves in the foot. We need public health teams and doctors so that if anything like this happens again we are ahead of it not behind. Who better to help train them than the man who lead hse during the pandemic

  32. If it waddles and quacks it’s a duck

    This looks like a hush-hush insider con job. It’s been waddling and quacking all week.

    I suppose the arrangement is that he walks and thus deflects questions from his civil service mates who facilitated the arrangement in the first place.

    Irish public sector back scratching at its most blatant.

  33. Don’t worry he will retire as CMO but get a job as an advisor to the department of health as a consultant yet.

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