Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

This has been a botched secondment in reality. It has not worked out in any fashion or which anybody could have designed. It has been a disaster in many ways. A lot of the facts around it, to be honest, many people find very hard to believe.

This was the highest profile public servant in the State at the time. Dr. Tony Holohan was a household name known by children across the land. Then we have a unique recruitment package, by all accounts, in many ways. In large part, the recruitment package was designed by the competitor for the recruitment or the person who was to fulfil the recruitment, a person who had a significant financial interest in the recruitment itself. It was an open-ended secondment in which the candidate, Dr. Tony Holohan, said he was not going to go back to the job of CMO at all anyway. That is not the definition of secondment most people would understand.

There was a €20 million budget, at a salary that was €30,000 higher than other equivalent people working within Trinity College at the same level. His was an outlier project at all levels. Most people, first of all, cannot understand how the Government did not know anything about this. This came very shortly after the Katherine Zappone affair where the Government appears, in that scenario, also to have recruited an insider for a particular job.

Most people would have the understanding that each citizen in the country is entitled to apply for a job and to be interviewed for the job on the basis of their qualifications and ability to be considered for that job. Yet, as we said earlier, we have a competition of one for the job in question.

I want to go to the issue of Deirdre Gillane, because there seems to be a difficulty in that regard. The report released a couple of days ago quite clearly states that the Secretary General went on to say that the Secretary General to the Government confirmed that he told the Taoiseach's chief of staff Ms Deirdre Gillane, and that the facts indicate that the Secretary General to the Government knew all of the critical details. Did you say to the author of this report that the Secretary General to the Government confirmed that he told Deirdre Gillane about this.