Health whistleblower Corr faces disciplinary hearing 

Shane Corr, a senior civil servant at the Department of Health, went public in 2021, a year after making a protected disclosure, with allegations the Department of Health had compiled dossiers concerning children with disabilities to use as leverage in defending court actions. Picture: RTÉ Investigates/RTÉ

A Department of Health whistleblower who exposed a controversial State “strategy” to deny people reparations for nursing home overpayments faces a disciplinary hearing, and possible dismissal, next week.

Shane Corr, an auditor with the department’s finance section, has been suspended from duty since May 2022 following the leaking of a number of recordings of departmental meetings which suggested wholesale problems with the finances of the HSE.

A disciplinary hearing had been set for Monday involving Mr Corr and the department’s HR function. Mr Corr may attend with a union representative or a fellow civil servant, but is not allowed to bring legal representation.

He had requested the hearing be delayed by a further two weeks in order to give him more time to prepare, a request the department denied, citing the fact Mr Corr had been given notice regarding the action in February of this year.

The department has assented, however, to moving the hearing from its headquarters at Miesian Plaza in Dublin to a “neutral venue”, after Mr Corr indicated he would not feel comfortable attending there.

The department insisted there is no reason for Mr Corr to feel ill at ease attending its headquarters as the hearing "is a disciplinary meeting, not an adversarial process”.

Mr Corr, 53, went public in 2021, a year after making a protected disclosure, with allegations the Department of Health had compiled dossiers concerning children with disabilities to use as leverage in defending court actions.

An independent review by senior counsel Conleth Bradley subsequently found the department’s actions did “not come within the definition of wrongdoing” under the Protected Disclosure Act.

Mr Corr then made a series of further protected disclosures to the department from September 2021. When those disclosures were not directly addressed, he brought them to the attention of the Public Accounts Committee, and then the media.

They emerged via a series of recordings of senior management meetings within the Department of Health’s finance function, which seemed to suggest relations between the department and the HSE were at an historic low.

It is believed the surreptitious manner by which the recordings were obtained will likely be the chief focus of the disciplinary hearing.

More recently, Mr Corr exposed a decades-old “strategy”, by which claimants of reparations for historic nursing home overcharges were to be dragged through court battles up to the point of disclosure, in order to minimise the financial impact to the State.