As he lay in a Dublin hospital bed in the hopes of seeing a neurologist, a junior doctor walked into the hospital room of Fine Gael TD Patrick O\u2019Donovan.<\/p>\n
His epilepsy had been misdiagnosed several times at this point, with doctors telling him he was \u201cworking too hard\u201d and was \u201ctired\u201d. He needed to \u201cgo home and get over it\u201d.<\/p>\n
He was starting to believe they were right.<\/p>\n
As he sought to be transferred to his neurologist at Beaumont Hospital, the other Dublin hospital told Mr O\u2019Donovan this would not be possible. They would check if they had someone on call.<\/p>\n
It was at this point, Mr O\u2019Donovan told the Irish Examiner, he hit \u201crock bottom\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cA junior doctor came in to me and said, \u2018We don’t have a neurologist on call at the moment. You don’t need a neurologist anyway. There’s nothing wrong with you. But we have a psychiatrist on call\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
The doctor walked back into the room a short time later and told Mr O\u2019Donovan he had \u201cfound out\u201d who he was. He \u201cthrew\u201d a Post-it pad at him containing his name and Medical Council number. Mr O\u2019Donovan never made a complaint.<\/p>\n
He instead disconnected himself from the hospital machines, discharged himself, and boarded a Luas with his wife, Eileen.<\/p>\n
He was initially diagnosed with epilepsy over a decade ago, but Mr O\u2019Donovan has previously said that doctors continuously \u201cdisputed\u201d this.<\/p>\n
But, after collapsing in the D\u00e1il in June 2023, he was admitted to the monitoring unit in Beaumont Hospital, where his neurologist diagnosed him with deep frontal lobe epilepsy. <\/p>\n
On the day he got his diagnosis, it felt like \u201cthe bottom had fallen out of my world\u201d.<\/p>\n
\n I thought my job was gone. My ability to be able to function is gone. I’m going to wind up in a situation where I start having these seizures in public.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThe people won’t vote for me. Will they vote for the disabled guy? Would they trust the disabled guy in politics?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr O\u2019Donovan said that since he started speaking about his epilepsy, people have been \u201cvery nice about it\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, as he sat in his Limerick office speaking to the Irish Examiner over video call, Mr O\u2019Donovan reminisced about fears he felt a previous Christmas. <\/p>\n
While a junior minister in the Department of Finance, Paschal Donohoe asked him to attend an event.<\/p>\n
As he sat in the Westbury Hotel, his attention was often on the \u201cpsychedelic Christmas trees\u201d littered around the room.<\/p>\n
By the end of the presentation, Mr O\u2019Donovan \u201csounded like somebody who was drunk\u201d.<\/p>\n
He continued: \u201cI have always been worried that if I had an attack on a radio station, that someone, a political opponent or whatever, would put up a tweet, \u2018Is Patrick O\u2019Donovan drunk?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a huge concern for me when I go on television.\u201d<\/p>\n
Only a handful of people in Leinster House were aware of Mr O\u2019Donovan\u2019s diagnosis.<\/p>\n
However, shortly after he was appointed arts minister last January, comments about his perceived lack of interest in the sector appeared in newspapers.<\/p>\n
One Irish Times columnist suggested that his name had been \u201cpulled out of Miche\u00e1l Martin\u2019s hat\u201d and that those in the sector \u201cwould have been hoping\u201d that Hildegarde Naughton had gotten his job as she had \u201cat least been known to darken the doors of a theatre occasionally\u201d.<\/p>\n
The comments infuriated Mr O\u2019Donovan, who revealed his epilepsy diagnosis to a Sunday newspaper several months later.<\/p>\n
He told the Irish Examiner he \u201ctotally was\u201d forced into sharing the information. <\/p>\n
\u201cI didn’t want to have to kind of speak openly about my health,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\n But I felt that the blaggarding I had gotten unfairly over not being the type of person that can go to a concert where there are flashing lights or things like that, I kind of felt that like I have a duty to stand up for myself here.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a small group of people who were beginning to walk all over me.\u201d<\/p>\n
A year into this role in the Department of Culture, Communications and Sports, Mr O\u2019Donovan said he believes he has \u201cthe best job in Government\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere isn’t a day in the life of an Irish person that is not touched by my department,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
By his own admission, things got off to a \u201cropey start\u201d. Just a fortnight after being appointed, Mr O\u2019Donovan told Cabinet that the 2023 annual report for the Arts Council contained details of a botched IT project that had seen \u20ac5.3m lost.<\/p>\n
A report being carried out by Professor Niamh Brennan into the Arts Council is ongoing and will be completed \u201cshortly\u201d.<\/p>\n
There are other parts of the department, including commemorations, Irish history and sport, that he \u201cabsolutely loves\u201d.<\/p>\n
There is a \u201chuge year\u201d coming up for sport, he said, with the Irish Open heading to Doonbeg and preparations for next year\u2019s Ryder Cup in Adare continuing. There is also work underway to secure a second NFL game in Dublin following the success of last year\u2019s Croke Park showdown between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Minnesota Vikings.<\/p>\n
\n Mr O\u2019Donovan\u2019s \u201cnumber one priority\u201d for 2026 will be on social media age verification. It is expected that Ireland\u2019s EU presidency this year will put a strong emphasis on the subject.\n <\/p>\n
\n He accused Europe of having \u201cfailed children\u201d when it comes to social media, as he accused the parliament of \u201cspending most of their time talking about innocuous things that are only trying to make life difficult for people to be citizens of the EU\u201d.\n <\/p>\n
\n He added: \u201cEurope is the big problem here. Europe is the tolerant godparent that isn\u2019t actually acting in a functional way to protect any of us.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI shouldn’t have to do what I’m doing. The European Commission should have to do it.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n 41766458\/readmore]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As he lay in a Dublin hospital bed in the hopes of seeing a neurologist, a junior doctor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3775,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-224475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-fine-gael","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}