How many boosters should we get, do you thinkâŠâŠIâm gonna get triple boosted just to be extra safe
As many as Pfizer want mate
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Pfizer are free to poison whoever the wantâŠnow that theyâve assassinated Russell Brand
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is that true about the excess deaths?
It isâŠi think theyâre only about 8% above average atm, well down feom what they were. (Deaths usually fall after a pandemic)
The trademark Limerick stubborness there
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heâd fit in well around here
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Tony Holohan memoir: Former CMO does not admit to a single mistake during the Covid crisis
In his new memoir, the former chief medical officer recalls his career in the often thankless field of public health and the final days of his beloved late wife Emer
No regrets: Tony Holohan at home in Terenure, Dublin. Photo by Steve Humphreys
Danielle Barron
Today at 01:30
He was portrayed as the bad guy in the Cervical Check scandal. Then he became the stern but avuncular pandemic tsar, and the grieving widower. Former chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohanâs public persona has certainly pivoted over the years. Now his own recollection of the pandemic hits the shelves just before the inquiry into Irelandâs Covid response is due to begin.
But this is not just a rehash of those extraordinary times. First and foremost, it is an ode to his wife, the accomplished public health specialist Emer Feely, who did not want to die but did so cruelly and painfully in 2021, after nine years of attempting to keep the blood cancer multiple myeloma at bay. The book affords an insight into Holohanâs tumultuous private life, which he navigated in parallel to steering the country through âthe defining public health emergency of our timeâ.
His happily spent youth in Limerick is well covered, and contains many prescient nods to his later career. He recalls the RTĂ news cameras turning up for the local agricultural show, which was organised by his uncle and where he helped out every year, and thinking it was âa big dealâ. Clearly the irony of finding himself as a mainstay on the evening news many years later is not lost on him. His later passion for addressing health inequalities was undoubtedly partly fuelled by the time he spent playing with local Traveller children, encouraged by his mother who would also feed them her apple sponge.
Holohan doesnât have a medical pedigree â his father was a garda â and he admits that putting medicine in UCD as his first choice on his CAO form was done almost on a whim. He meets the glamorous Emer Feely on one of his first days in Belfield, and their sweet and slow-burning courtship is heartwarming to read. First friends, then finally boyfriend and girlfriend, before marrying and having two children, Clodagh and Ronan, while both training and later working as public health specialists. His love and admiration for her jumps off the page and the first of many lumps in your throat will be forming around now.
As he recalls his college days, another side to his personality is revealed â as class rep, he organised the delivery of free beer kegs from alcohol companies for college parties. Now, the public health doctor admits, âI have a very different view of that form of promotionâ. Choosing to go the route of general practice training, he works with people who lived in true poverty and deprivation, which prompts his segue into public health medicine. But unlike other areas of medicine, he acknowledges there is no âimmediate gratification, rather the consequences of decisions unfold over many yearsâ. Holohan understands that we are rarely thanked for the things that didnât happen, and indeed the role of the public health doctor can be a thankless one â âthe very intangibility of prevention and public health can make for a very hard sellâ. Indeed, âdrink less, donât smoke, stay indoorsâ are not always things we want to hear.
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Within a few years he finds himself in the since-razed Hawkins House as deputy chief medical officer, later rising to CMO when his predecessor retires. He is immediately plunged into the dioxin scandal (where pork products were contaminated with dioxin and had to be taken off the shelves before Christmas), which is a baptism of fire to say the least. An âintense few daysâ, he learns valuable skills in dealing with the media and battling vested interests, while grappling with a true public health emergency. The swine flu pandemic is another major test, although many of us recall it in the vaguest of terms. He also notes that he learned how to operate within the civil service, âa job in itselfâ.
His first brush with intense media attention and public scrutiny, however, came with what is colloquially now known as the Cervical Check controversy. It emerged that some women diagnosed with cervical cancer had not been told that their earlier negative screening had been incorrect. The need for a national screening programme was obvious, Holohan writes; social disadvantage meant some women were being screened too frequently and others not enough or at all, while some pathologists were allegedly reading slides at their kitchen tables. Yet the scandal threatened to obliterate this hard-won service.
Here, he stands his ground. He reaffirms that screening tests are not diagnostic tests, a simple fact of medicine that was pretty much lost in the ensuing outcry. The âwidespread belief that every false negative is negligentâ was propagated by some politicians and a hostile media. He speaks of meeting Vicky Phelan and Emma Mhic MathĂșna, two mothers of young children who were dying of cancer â just like his own wife.
All of this, he strongly believes, made him the right man for the job when Covid came along. Throughout the pandemic, Holohan was a target of public frustration and has since come in for retrospective criticism of many of the pandemic restrictions on public life, even from his own peers. He rightly points out that he and his family suffered from these as much as anyone â his wife was extremely vulnerable to the risk of infection at this point and this meant that they could not see their extended family while their two teenage children hardly socialised for many months.
But he does not admit to â and I had to re-read these chapters to check â a single misstep throughout the entire crisis. He bluntly outlines the rationale for many of the Nphet decisions, and explains that they always knew some people would defy the restrictions but the goal was to ensure that most did not. This transpired to be the case and he comes across as proud of Irelandâs overall response. His management style has been criticised as autocratic and even dictatorial elsewhere, but Holohan appears to refute this, noting the difficulty in giving everyone a fair hearing when meetings were confined to Zoom from a very early stage.
He also takes the opportunity to strongly deny having been the âleakâ that saw almost all Nphet recommendations being fed to the media while apparently en route to the Health Minister and Taoiseach. Here, Holohan does not mince words, calling out the âunpatriotic , cowardly and unprofessional behaviour of one memberâ. One wagers he knows exactly who it was and wishes to make them squirm.
This isnât a book for settling scores, however, but we can read between the lines. Health Minister Stephen Donnelly, he of the infamous âthumbs upâ emoji, only appears fleetingly, and Holohan twists the knife into Leo Varadkar by describing how distraught his wife was to hear the then TĂĄnaiste question the motivations of Nphet when calling for the second lockdown in late 2020. Varadkar has admitted in recent days that he âwent too farâ but Holohan places it on the record that he never apologised to him personally.
Dr Tony Holohan on losing his wife: âI remember Emerâs strength. She didnât go to pieces. She was the one holding my handâ
How the boring Theresa May saved the day (in her own mind)
Holohan is sharply critical of the Governmentâs decision to have a âmeaningful Christmasâ in 2020, leading to over 1,500 Covid-related deaths in January 2021. This was the single worst month for deaths throughout the entire pandemic and came just as vaccines that would have saved our most vulnerable were bound for Ireland. The way he writes it, you also thinkâŠwhy? The vaccines were en route, not as fast as we would have liked, but we just had to wait it out another little while. Remember the furore about a couple of dozen errant vaccines being offered to teachers in a south Dublin school? Now the HSE literally canât give away booster shots. Maybe itâs just difficult to remember how fed up we all were, those short few years ago. But Holohan has no regrets in the part he played: âI believed in the necessity to speak truth to power and not to be afraid to do so.â
Where Holohan does have regrets is when it comes to his wifeâs illness. The failure to diagnose her promptly despite two worrying visits to the emergency department clearly still haunts him. âLooking back, it is hard for me to think about the faith I placed in the reassurance that there was nothing serious behind her symptoms.â A subsequent complaint to the hospital in question yielded an unsatisfactory response. He tells this story to offer comfort to those who have been through something similar: âThis can â and does â happen to anyone.â He is also brutally honest about the frustrations he experienced when he transitioned from husband to carer, as Emer tried to salvage what was left of her independence. Emer was clearly his sounding board and his support, not just emotionally but intellectually and analytically, and remained so right up until the end.
The pages where he describes his wifeâs final days and the days that followed are almost unbearably poignant. We can sense the void that opens up after so many years spent caring for her, family life revolving around hospital visits and appointments. Holohan is now in a new relationship and clearly smitten.
His quiet and dignified exit from the office of the CMO was marred by the controversy surrounding the finer details of his ill-fated appointment to Trinity College Dublin â a silly and sorry mess that could have been avoided. Itâs clear he feels he was shafted but he is gracious enough about it.
But this is a book about grief as much as it is a book about being one of the most polarising characters in public health. To err is human. But doctors, as we so often forget, are human, and Dr Holohan has humanised himself with this searingly honest and personal book.
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That will sort the Christmas present out for a few people this year.
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Holohan should be facing prison
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Is this T firing the first shot in his Presidential bid?
Chairman of the Mater?
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Beatify the bastard
Holohan needs the cash after missing out on the made up Trinity gig.
Just after dropping off a few groceries to a few neighbours earlier ⊠3 of them in the house, all 3 have been welded to the bed on and off in the past week, feverish, sore throat etc. All testing positive for Covid.
All of them have had 5/6 protective jabs got at this stage and it not worth a flying fuck to them 
Con job.
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In like flynn. You must own half the parish by now?
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