Paul Reid started his working life clambering up telephone poles — and he has not stopped climbing to the top ever since.
fter starting as a trainee installing landlines for the state phone company, he went on to become its executive director of networks before moving on to the charity Trócaire and from there a senior post in the civil service. As the now outgoing-chief executive of the HSE, he has a pay package of more than €400,000 a year.
Having left school at 16 without a Leaving Cert, he later resumed his studies at night, eventually qualifying with a BA in human resources and industrial relations from the National College of Ireland and an MBA from Trinity College Dublin.
He has said that growing up in a single-parent council home in the working-class Dublin suburb of Finglas as one of six children has helped him “stay grounded”.
“My dad — these things happen in families — he wasn’t there for a significant period of our time,” he told an RTÉ interviewer.
On social media, he cheerfully brushes aside snobbish comments about his accent, along with the usual criticisms of the senior officials handling the pandemic.
Near the start of the crisis, he jokingly complained on Twitter of being slagged for his “inner city” Dublin accent: “It’s completely unfair… I’m a northsider.”
In another response to a complaint, he said: “To the guy who said on Twitter that my voice ‘sounds more like the manager of a League of Ireland club, possibly St Pat’s or Shelbourne, than someone running the HSE’… What an insult to a Bohs fan!”
During his tenure there has been much coverage of his remuneration package, which includes a company car.
A note in the HSE’s financial accounts for 2020 says: “The CEO received total remuneration of €426,208 comprising basic pay €358,651, allowances €48,416 and benefit in kind (company car) €19,141.”
Contrary to some reports earlier this year, Reid did not receive a car allowance. The €19,141 figure is a value placed on the car as a benefit in kind for tax purposes.
As well as the company car, for a time at the start of pandemic he was also supplied with an army driver, who ferried him to and from his home in Leitrim in a car lent to him by BMW.
Explaining why he had the use of two cars for a time, one with an army driver, his spokesman said Reid was working up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week in the early months of the pandemic. This involved driving to and from his home in Leitrim.
After a couple of near-miss incidents while travelling, the spokesman said, it became clear that this was a safety issue and Reid took the advice of an emergency management expert. The Defence Forces then provided the driver.
Although he still has a home in Finglas, Reid and his wife Margaret bought a house in Carrick-on-Shannon about 17 years ago, spending most weekends there “to escape the intensity of work in Dublin”. They stayed in Leitrim when travel restrictions were announced early in the pa ndemic. The HSE spokesman said Reid was there during the first lockdown and remained there until travel restrictions were lifted.
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A pop-up Covid-19 testing centre at Keadeen Hotel in Newbridge, Co Kildare, following a spate of outbreaks in the county in August 2020
His pay and conditions may have raised eyebrows, but when he became chief executive of the HSE in April 2019, he took on what is arguably the most challenging job in the public service, with a workforce of over 100,000.
His predecessor, Tony O’Brien, described the HSE in an interview in 2015 as a badly conceived “amorphous blob that nobody understood”. In a recent column in the Business Post, he suggested that “viewed as a single entity with power concentrated nationally, the HSE is effectively ungovernable”.
Poacher turned gamekeeper
Brendan Howlin, a former health minister who worked with Reid when he was minister for public expenditure and reform (DPER), says: “Running the HSE is an immensely difficult job at the best of times. It’s an area loaded with very powerful vested interests that can cause enormous resistance.”
In union circles, Reid was seen as a poacher turned gamekeeper. In his youth in the 1980s, he was a member of the Workers’ Party, and he has said that he could have run for election but decided against it.
In Telecom Éireann, he was regarded as a skilled negotiator for the Communication Workers’ Union as a shop steward. Then he switched to management and was on the other side in negotiations.
When he joined the Department of Public Enterprise and Reform and became assistant secretary-general, he led negotiations for swingeing pay cuts and was involved in reforms to make the civil service more efficient and cut out duplication of services.
Brian Hayes, the former Fine Gael TD who worked with him as minister of state in DPER, says: “He was totally calm, very focused and strategic in his thinking. He brought a private sector rigour to the job.”
To his critics from that time, he would be seen as one of the civil servants implementing harsh austerity measures as he cut the public service pay bill by €1bn.
Reid may have arrived in the HSE with a vision of how he could reform the disparate and unwieldy organisation, but within nine months he was dealing with the greatest health crisis in the State’s history.
Towards the end of January 2020, after 56 deaths in Wuhan in China and two cases in Paris, Reid convened a meeting of his National Crisis Management Team.
In the weeks that followed, as the virus spread across Europe and hospitals were overwhelmed, his immediate concern was whether the hospital system would cope. The HSE was desperately short of intensive care capacity, a problem that preceded pandemic.
The HSE had 255 staffed ICU beds at the outset of the pandemic. By early this year the total was been brought up to about 300, with a capacity to surge to 350.
Reid was involved in a desperate scramble to obtain personal protective equipment for the health service. He has said that in a normal year, spending on PPE would amount to €15m, but it rocketed to €1bn, with huge consignments bought from China with mixed results.
Since the start of the pandemic, Reid has been a calm and reassuring presence on the airwaves. But there have been reports of tensions and rows with chief medical officer Tony Holohan, the other man who the public health response to Covid and who is himself just days away from leaving the Department of Health.
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Tensions: There were reports of an early flare-up between chief medical officer Tony Holohan and HSE chief Paul Reid over testing capacity. Photo by Colin Keegan
According to Richard Chambers in A State of Emergency, his book about the crisis, there was an early flare-up when Holohan was pressing the HSE to build up testing capacity for Covid-19. Reid reportedly went ‘ballistic’ when Holohan publicly set a target of 100,000 tests a week. In Chambers’ account, Reid had not been consulted and there were “massive conniptions behind the scenes”.
The book says there was a view among some high-ranking Department of Health officials that early in the pandemic the HSE should have focused more on building up testing capacity and resourcing public health teams, rather than ICU capacity, building mortuaries and involving the army.
In the months that followed, the HSE did increase its testing capacity. By November last year it was able to carry out 20,000 tests a day. While tensions are inevitable in a crisis, some close observers believe Reid has shown more diplomatic skills than Holohan in his relations with politicians and civil servants.
He may have presented an image of unflappability, but to his critics in the National Public Health Emergency Team, at times he was too calm.
Tensions between Reid and Nphet rose again in the autumn and winter of 2020, when Holohan called for severe restrictions while Reid reassured the Government that the system was coping well.
To his critics in Nphet, Reid was seen as batting for the Government at the time, focusing too much on the present rather than the dangerous future of hospitals as case numbers rose.
Successful rollout
Reid is given credit for the successful roll-out of the vaccination programme, which has achieved extremely high numbers despite early difficulties with supplies.
By January this year, Ireland had the second highest rate in the EU for full vaccinations of adults, at 94pc. It was first in the EU league table for booster vaccines at 57pc of the adult population.
Reid has said in an interview with the Irish Examiner that crisis has seemed to follow him wherever he goes, from dealing with the effects of storm damage at Eircom and extracting people from tricky situations overseas with Trócaire to the effects of economic crash and pay negotiations in a government department.
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Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly with Paul Reid at the launch of the Covid-19 tracker app. Photo by Frank McGrath
Away from the rigours of his job, he plays golf and has been active with a club near his home in Leitrim.
Rising at 5.30am, he also enjoys going to the gym, running through fields in Leitrim. He is a lifelong supporter of Leeds United and has said his favourite film is Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Cooking is his way of coping with stress. “I find that very relaxing. My wife would say I’m a better cook than she is and that’s why she keeps asking me to cook,” he said. “I do a good beef bourguignon.”
Reid and his wife Margaret have two grown-up children, Glynn and Ciara. Glynn is a senior executive with Facebook in Austin, Texas, and has been active in the Black Lives Matter movement. Reid keeps in touch with his granddaughter Aisling in the US on FaceTime. Ciara is based in Dublin and works with children with special needs.
In an interview for the podcast CEO Outlook, Reid has said that he lives by a four-word mantra, which he repeats to himself at certain times, whether playing golf or making a big presentation: “Confident, positive, strong, secure.”
He has said several times that in responding to the pandemic, he had to make quick decisions and he expected to get 70pc right and 30pc wrong. He regards that as “a good ratio”.
When it comes to failures, the HSE was criticised for providing inadequate protection to nursing home residents early in the pandemic.
There were 2,349 deaths among nursing home residents with Covid-19 between March 2020 and May 2021. In almost 80pc of those cases, the residents who contracted the virus died in the nursing home.
In a Virgin Media interview, Reid said he would do some things differently if he had the chance, including the response to the crisis in nursing homes.
Paying tribute today, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said Reid “played a critical role in leading Ireland’s response to the greatest health emergency of our times”.
“He leaves behind him an organisation much enhanced for his time as Chief Executive and one that is already making real progress in implementing reform and improvement across many aspects of healthcare provision.”
He will also leave long waiting lists of patients requiring treatment, and his successor will have to implement structural reforms to ensure that patients get faster and more effective treatment, regardless of their means.
In a statement confirming his plans to step down as HSE chief, Reid said he was making the decision with a “heavy heart,” and that it was the hardest decision he had ever made in relation to his own career.
“No organisation will ever match the commitment, dedication and relentless willingness to go beyond the call of duty that I have witnessed as we battled multiple waves of Covid, a criminal cyber attack while driving a significant reform agenda,” he said.
His resignation was prompted by two key factors. He wants to spend more time with his family “who had made many sacrifices to support him” and a belief that the HSE was entering a new phase and that the appointment of a new leader was now timely.
The pay packet may be generous and the pandemic may have subsided for now, but the job is unlikely to get any easier.