"Let me re-emphasise that I couldn't care less."
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has said he "couldn't care less" about how many times he is mentioned by the Department of Health Twitter account.
Donnelly made the comments on RTÉ's Prime Time on Thursday night in the wake of a report in the
Irish Times this week that said the Minister for Health queried why he was not being mentioned in tweets posted on the Department of Health’s Twitter feed.
The report stated that an analysis of the department's Twitter feed was completed by the Minister in January and showed no references were made to Donnelly on the account, while the tweets from the Department of Further and Higher Education’s Twitter feed showed its Minister, Simon Harris, had been mentioned 10 times.
Earlier this week Donnelly said
he hadn't seen the article but it had likely been a piece of work done by someone in his department which had shown up in a Freedom of Information request.
Speaking to Prime Time's Fran McNulty, Donnelly said his focus was on dealing with the "really serious issues" facing Ireland right now now.
“Fran, with the greatest respect, right now today we're dealing with a vaccine programme, we're dealing with mandatory hotel quarantine and we just got a deal over the line on public health doctors that for 25 years we have been looking for it,” Donnelly said.
"No, I did not raise an issue. There was a piece of work done looking at the communications out of the department.
"One official sent another official an email on it, there was a piece of analysis done that I’m not mentioned in. But Fran, let me re-emphasise that I couldn't care less.
"We are dealing with really serious issues right now, that's my focus and that's the department's focus, anything else is really irrelevant.”
