Chief medical officer Prof Breda Smyth to leave role

The State’s chief medical officer, Prof Breda Smyth, is leaving after 18 months in the post for an academic professorship in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

Confirming her appointment on Friday evening, she said was successful in a public appointments competition and has been offered the post of Professor of Public Health with the RCSI “in partnership with the HSE”.

The new role “will enable me to continue to work to improve the health of the population through research, teaching and programmatic health service improvement work,” she told The Irish Times.

Prof Smyth was appointed acting chief medical officer at the Department of Health in July 2022, taking over from Dr Tony Holohan, who spent 14 years in the role. In November 2022, she was permanently appointed to the post.

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Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly and his department did not respond when asked by this newspaper in recent weeks whether Prof Smyth was leaving her post.

A public health specialist for two decades, she was previously a professor of public health medicine at the University of Galway and a public health consultant in the HSE’s western division.

The department has suffered an exodus of senior staff since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Key medical posts have been left unfilled, despite the gaps in Ireland’s pandemic preparedness exposed by Covid-19.

Last year, an advertisement seeking expressions of interest within the Health Service Executive for the vacant deputy CMO posts yielded no applications.

The CMO, who is paid €202,000 a year, reports directly to department secretary general Robert Watt and serves as “an integral member of the senior management team”, according to the department.

I came into the role of CMO at a time of great uncertainty and risk as we dealt with the mitigation strategy for the Covid-19 pandemic,” Prof Smyth said. “Thanks to the positive response of the Irish people, we emerged from the pandemic with one of the lowest excess mortality rates in the world.

“We now live in a more predictive state however it is important to continue to prepare for the unknowns. The scoping of an agency to focus on health protection and emerging threats is now underway. I will continue to collaborate and support government’s Covid 19 inquiry. It is important to learn lessons, to improve our processes and approach and become better prepared for the next pandemic.”

Prof Smyth grew up in Straide, Co Mayo, and is an accomplished fiddle and tin-whistle player who has recorded several trad albums. She studied for a master’s in public health in UCD, a PhD in the University of Galway and completed postdoctoral work in the United States.

During the Covid-19 pandemic Prof Smyth sat on the National Public Health Emergency Team and the expert advisory group that examined the use of rapid antigen tests.

She was a founding member of the Covid-19 epidemiology modelling advisory group that advised Nphet on the trajectory of the virus during the 30-month pandemic.

Prof Smyth made occasional appearances as a medical expert offering health advice to the public on Covid-19 during Nphet’s regular televised press briefings from the department.

She joined the department on a three-year secondment from her position at the HSE. One of her main roles is to ensure Ireland is adequately prepared for a future pandemic.

At the time of her appointment, Prof Smyth said she looked forward to working with colleagues at the department and across health and social care “to promote and protect public health and the health and wellbeing of the population of Ireland”.

Her predecessor Dr Holohan was the focus of controversy in 2022 when he announced he was stepping down as CMO and would become a professor of public health strategy and leadership at Trinity College Dublin. Ultimately, he retired and did not take up the planned academic position.

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