HSE boss paid €512,000 despite crippling cutbacks

HEALTH Service Executive (HSE) chief executive Professor Brendan Drumm earned more than €500,000 last year at a time when vital frontline services were hit with a series of crippling cutbacks not witnessed in more than two decades.

On page 87 of the HSE’s annual report for 2008, published yesterday, it states that Prof Drumm’s total pay packet last year amounted to a massive €512,000.

This figure – which includes the former consultant paediatrician’s basic salary, pension and other work-related payments – is €18,000 higher than his overall income for 2007.

A HSE spokesperson was last night unable to confirm whether the annual report figure included a performance-related payment for Prof Drumm, which, while ratified, has been the subject of internal discussions since October. But coming during a period when Prof Drumm and Health Minister Mary Harney have warned patients the economic crisis has forced them to close hospital wards, introduce a staff recruitment freeze, and impose over-70s medical card cutbacks, and left them unable to fund the cervical cancer vaccine, news of the massive 2008 payout to Prof Drumm has been described as “obscene” by those dependent on frontline services.

Labour health spokes-person, Jan O Sullivan, said: “We have all of these cutbacks right now and the one that upsets me most is Crumlin. Children are waiting longer for operations now and that’s not good enough. Nobody should be paid that kind of money, I say that about the consultants contract as well. Ireland has huge levels of money at the top, and we have to stop paying it,” she said.

Irish Patients Association chairman, Stephen McMahon, said “while the contract might say you are entitled to a bonus” there is “a moral decision that has to be made as well”.

Public accounts committee chairman, Bernard Allen, has called for any future pay increases for senior HSE officials to be scrapped, with the Fine Gael TD adding that the existing income levels were “obscene” in the current climate.

The payout means that since taking up the post in June 2005, Prof Drumm has earned close to €1.5 million in salary and bonuses.

Documents show this pay packet includes €112,500 in performance-related bonuses between 2006 and 2007 alone, with his contract entitling him to a yearly bonus equivalent of up to 25% of his salary depending on whether set targets are met.

Prof Drumm’s pension contributions have also exceeded €115,000 in the first four years of his five-year contract, while his last stated basic salary of about €370,000 is €66,000 higher than the recommended basic pay set by the Review Body on Higher Remuneration in the Public Service for his successor.

Prof Drumm has previously said the details of his pay packet were part of the contract first put to Prof Aidan Halligan, who turned down the position, and he was thus not responsible for the details of the package.