Health spokesperson for the Social Democrats Roisin Shortall has called on Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly to come before the Oireachtas health committee to answer questions about the independent report into a proposed move by former chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan to Trinity College Dublin last year.
The report concluded that the process by-passed the accepted protocols.
Ms Shortall told RTÉ Radio’s Today with Claire Byrne show that she also wanted to know why the independent report had taken so long, given that it had been commissioned early last year.
Ms Shortall said the report had been completed last June and was then sent to the Minister for Health, but "there was a certain amount of back and forth with various people who reported in it" before the final report was given to Mr Donnelly on October 17th.
"Really the Minister has been sitting on that until now, and I think that is problematic. I don't know why it has taken so long," Ms Shortall said.
"The second thing is that the report is essentially about a situation where a very senior public servant, the secretary general of the Department of Health [Robert Watt], took two decisions without apparently notifying anybody else, and there were two very significant decisions.
"The first one was that he gave a written commitment to Trinity College to provide annual funding of €2 million a year for a research project, and that seemed to be an open-ended commitment - tt could have lasted up to 10 years.
"The second decision he took was to approve the secondment of Dr Tony Holohan. Again, potentially up to his retirement, which could be a 10-year period on full pay, being paid by the Department of Health," she explained.
"The totality of those two decisions amounts to a very substantial amount of money, something in the region of €23 million over that period.
"That was a decision that it would seem was taken solely by Robert Watt, without reference to other people."
Ms Shortall claimed there is "obviously a very clear conflict of evidence in this report where Mr Watt is making out that he informed others".
However, she added this was "emphatically" denied by the department's chief of staff Deirdre Gillane, who was actually "very, very trenchant" in her response.
The former co-leader of the Social Democrats called for Mr Watt to also come before the Oireachtas health committee, adding the question remains over which version of events to believe – that of Mr Watt, or that of Ms Gillane and Martin Fraser, the former secretary general of the Department of the Taoiseach.
"The second question then is what about the issue of accountability? This is a substantial amount of public money. The decision, it would seem, was taken as a solo run by Robert Watt.
"So what is the accountability for bypassing all of the normal protocols in relation to the spending of public money and not informing either the Minister or the Government generally?" Ms Shortall questioned.
"This is a political matter now, though, and it is in the hands of the Tánaiste and the Minister for Health, and they are the people that must take charge of this."
