Meanwhile, the department’s secretary general Robert Watt, he of the €81,000 salary hike who was brought in to rejuvenate how the department functions, has become something of a media celebrity, rarely out of the headlines — a situation anathema to the senior public servant, who is supposed to operate anonymously behind the wizard’s curtain.

The constant stream of controversy has actually helped the department’s cause in one way however — for as Donald Trump has shown, the human mind can only process so much media coverage at any one time.

Cast your mind back just three months and a matter easily as consequential as that of the Holohan secondment was unfolding. That particular issue had more to do with the relations between the HSE and its ostensible supervisor, the department.

If you can’t remember, I don’t blame you. A series of disclosures by a departmental whistleblower alleged the relationship between the two bodies was at a historically low ebb.

Shane Corr, who had in 2021 brought to public attention allegations that the department was involved in collating personal information regarding children with autism for use as leverage in court battles, made at least six further disclosures from September of that year — first to his own department, then its Oireachtas committee, and finally the Public Accounts Committee.

It was the last of those disclosures that hit home — four days after it was received by the PAC it emerged in the Business Post newspaper, backed up as it was by a series of recordings of departmental meetings.

The allegations were seismic. The disclosure stated that the HSE had been funded for the recruitment of 10,000 new employees in 2022, but was only planning on hiring just over half that number.

The chasing of “fake targets” in that manner was giving rise to “so much dysfunction”, one meeting heard, in terms of “trying to explain… stuff that we were never going to do”.

The recording reported by the Business Post further suggested that the HSE may have to make an accounting adjustment to its 2021 accounts to the tune of “hundreds of millions”.

Over the following fortnight, the revelations kept coming as Mr Corr’s previous disclosures finally saw the light of day.

They included, among others: that recruitment targets for home care hours were allegedly “batshit”, that the HSE had a “blatant disregard” for the department and had gone, in terms of financial management and accountability, “rogue”; and that the department’s supplementary budget estimate for 2021 of €515m may never have been needed or even actually spent.

New documents released to the Irish Examiner under freedom of information show the immediate reaction in the department to the whistleblower revelations was to scramble for cover.

With the HSE’s chief financial officer insistent that the prior year adjustment figure would be for less than €100m (a figure finally confirmed at last week’s Public Accounts Committee meeting as being €71.4m), the thrust of the statutory responses regarding the allegations were that they stemmed from “a private informal discussion between officials which was secretly recorded without the consent or knowledge of the officials concerned”, in the words of the head of the department’s finance unit.

Mr Watt himself subsequently informed the PAC that reporting around the matter had contained “factual inaccuracies”, resulting from the recordings having been made without the consent of those present, leading to “partial statements taken out of context”.

The Taoiseach himself got involved, saying the disclosures were not reflective of reality, and again focused on the fact the recordings from which they emanated had been obtained without the consent of those present, adding that those same officials were entitled to “brainstorm”.

What all this amounted to was the State playing the man and not the ball. But as a piece of crisis management, it was masterful. Barely three weeks later, the PAC was advised to strike Mr Corr’s disclosures from the record due to the manner in which the information was obtained and disclosed. The haste with which the committee acquiesced to this advice does not reflect well on its willingness to stand up for whistleblowers.

The strategy worked though. The matter fell from the headlines, and Mr Corr hasn’t been heard from since. We now know he has been suspended from duty (on full pay) pending an investigation, with Mr Watt stating last Thursday that it was “unacceptable to record private conversations in any setting”.

But the FOI documents released to the Irish Examiner back up Mr Corr’s story. They show that the minister for health was specifically briefed about €1bn in unpaid debts on the part of the HSE accumulated during 2020, and that a review process was under way to estimate what accounting adjustment would be necessary. Under the circumstances, the minister was advised to plead ignorance regarding the adjustment since he didn’t know how much it was going to be for.

Three months later, and the only person to suffer anything approaching a consequence over this episode is the whistleblower, who has been treated miserably. It would make you wonder if there is any appetite for change whatsoever within our public service.