Health service gets sick feeling as Halligan takes tonic away

He was billed as the great white hope. But Catherine Shannon says Professor Aidan Halligan’s decision to turn down the opportunity to reform the health service is an embarrassment for the Government.

HE accepted the challenge of overseeing the health service’s 96,000 staff yet issues raised by three teenage daughters proved “insurmountable”.

He would have handled an annual budget of €10 billion and overseen the biggest shake-up of the health service in the history of the State, but family life came first. To the more sceptical, the reasons put forward by Kevin Kelly, the executive chairman of the interim Health Service Executive (HSE), explaining why Professor Aidan Halligan will not take over as chief executive of the new Health Service Executive (HSE) are hard to stomach.