Masks deal fell through when Heroes Aid learned Irish media company was middleman

Dr Maitiú Ó Tuathail, Medical Director of Heroes-Aid (Left) with Mary Leahy, CEO of Heroes-Aid (Second from the Right) with frontline medical staff at the Safetynet Primary Care community assessment hub in the Mater Hospital during a delivery of essential PPE equipment from Heroes-Aid.

A deal to bring 150,000 masks to Ireland from China foundered after a fundraising group discovered that the €108,000 bill was payable to Irish festival management company Roqu Media International rather than a Chinese wholesaler.

Roqu, a company paid €14.1 million by the HSE to import ventilators from China, had offered masks to Covid fundraisers Heroes Aid at a cost of €0.72 per unit.

Heroes Aid, a group led by Co Galway public health nurse and former city councillor Mary Leahy, had liaised with Paul O’Brien, a Cork native with knowledge of Chinese supply lines and markets, to bring the Type II R surgical masks to Ireland in mid-April.

The group had initially worked with Conor McGregor to distribute €1.5 million in Personal Protective Equipment [PPE] that the MMA fighter had purchased to Irish hospitals in April 2020, at a time of a global PPE shortage.

Some €200,000 was subsequently received by the group via fundraising and direct donations, which led to its contact with Roqu via Mr O’Brien.

However, when an invoice was requested from Mr O’Brien by Heroes Aid volunteer Doug Leddin, he responded with a document payable to Irish-based Roqu.

“Every invoice I’d seen up to this point had been coming from the factory in China,” Mr Leddin said. “Why would we pay an Irish company we’d never heard of €100,000 of money donated by the public?” 

Mr O’Brien did not respond to the Irish Examiner's request for comment. 

Ms Leahy said that Heroes Aid “was never in touch with Roqu”, adding that she had vaguely heard of Robert Quirke, the owner and CEO of Roqu, but that he had had “some connection with Paul O’Brien”.

A lengthy conversation between Mr Leddin and Mr O’Brien via whatsapp message preceded the delivery of the Roqu invoice, with the former repeatedly requesting certificates of trade and images of the products in question from Mr O’Brien in order to allay fears of potential profiteering on the supply side by establishing a cost-per-mask.

Mr O’Brien told Mr Leddin that it was not possible to “ask for that info and I wouldn’t expect someone to give it to me”.

“I have received no documentation or information on these masks other than an invoice from an Irish media company,” Mr Leddin replied.

Mr O’Brien subsequently produced a number of certificates regarding the masks, although all of them were in Chinese text.

Roqu’s price of €108,000 for the Type II R surgical masks equated to a cost per unit of €0.72. However, Mr Leddin and fellow volunteer Joe Naughton refused to sanction the deal as offered.

Two weeks after the deal foundered, Heroes Aid was provided with an alternate price of €0.52 per unit by an Irish supplier in Hong Kong, equating to what would have amounted to a comparative loss of €30,000 on the 150,000 masks on offer from Roqu.

Mr O’Brien ceased engagement with Heroes Aid at the end of April, citing fatigue and distress at the suggestion that profiteering may have been involved in the proposed deal.

The Hong Kong deal was subsequently actioned and the masks distributed to Irish hospitals.

It recently emerged that the ventilators Roqu brought to Ireland for the HSE in April were subsequently deemed unusable by the Irish health service.