Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In those letters it says nothing more than, "Please ensure that this correspondence is added to Ms [Surname]'s medical record", and, "If open disclosure is indicated in this case, please follow the local hospital guidelines." Then there is another comment which says, "Do not include if the woman is known to have passed away." To me that would be the very opposite of open disclosure. There is literally no reference to telling the woman anything. For the avoidance of doubt, if anyone is unsure about what it is people are angry about, it is that impression that has been given that information was deliberately withheld. We can get into a conversation about whether that information was material to a woman's health and well-being, but it was information that certainly could and should have been shared, and by my reading of it, any policy of open disclosure should have encouraged that information to be shared with the woman herself. Dr. Holohan is signing off on these letters. They explicitly exclude telling women. They simply say "ensure that the correspondence is added to [her] medical records" and, "If open disclosure is indicated [very much optional here] please follow the local hospital guidelines", unless of course she has passed away, in which case just stick a note on her file. That is the sort of stuff that makes people very angry. Dr. Holohan might advise us on those letters and when he signed off on them. It does not look like open disclosure to me, but perhaps he has an alternative view.

Around the same time as these letters were circulating, Dr. Holohan sent an email to Ms Conroy on the memo. In it he said they should have a chat about this. Does Dr. Holohan have any recollection of that? Was it a formal meeting? What would they have been discussing at that time? It strikes me that Dr. Holohan has come here to talk to us, in hindsight, about all he knows, but the truth is that he and his colleagues knew more than the women themselves. That information was available to him and his colleagues. It is not fair for people who would have had sight of these memos from February 2016 to pretend they are surprised at the revelations now. This would have been known to them all along. It is shocking to me that that sort of information would not have been escalated to the level of a Minister.

I am not sure I am satisfied with the explanation Dr. Holohan gave because it is clear when these memos are read through that the women are hardly mentioned at all but the media features. Dr. Holohan and his colleagues were getting themselves ready for some class of a media storm. He would have seen the Minister in the Dáil two weeks ago. The Minister was not pleased at being handed information just as he walked in the door, and I do not think anybody would be in those circumstances. This information was known to Dr. Holohan in February 2016 because he would have had sight of those memos, so it is not fair of him to pretend it is coming as a surprise to him now. On the process of escalation, it defies belief that it would not have been escalated to the level of a Minister, but maybe Dr. Holohan can explain his involvement in those template letters, because clearly they were sent to him for his own information. I am assuming he read them and he was happy with the content.