Dr Tony Holohan has spoken about the challenges he and his family faced when his late wife, Dr Emer Holohan, battled cancer during the Covid-19 pandemic, saying it was "really hard".
Holohan, who served as Ireland's Chief Medical Officer for 14 years between 2008 and 2022, appears on the latest episode of Keys To My Life, the RTÉ series in which presenter Brendan Courtney meets Irish personalities who reveal how the places they've lived in have shaped their lives.
The public health physician opened up to Courtney about how he met Emer while studying Medicine in UCD in the mid-80s.
"We were both in the same class in college, she and her friend Martha, I happened with a friend of mine to sit in behind them one day and we just started chatting," he shared.
"That was in the first couple of days and then at one of the class parties in November of 1986, that was when we first kissed. And it just developed from there."
Holohan made an emotional visit to the first apartment he and Emer lived in as newlyweds in the Dublin suburb of Milltown.
"It feels very familiar. I haven't been in here since I left in late 1998. I can see Emer in this apartment, we had five/six years before we had children, so we had a lot of time with each other which was fantastic," he said.
"Sitting out on the balcony on the warm evenings, I can remember all that. It's a poignant memory for me to be honest. Bittersweet is the word I'd use."
Recalling Emer's battle with blood cancer during the pandemic, Holohan said: "Probably the most immediate thing that I can remember was the fear.
"There was a list of things that placed you at risk of Covid and Multiple myeloma was at the top of that list, but Emer couldn't stay at home all the time because she had to go to St James' [Hospital] for chemotherapy on a frequent basis.
"So Emer lived with an ever-present fear of that - a really existential fear."
He continued: "It was very difficult, there were practical things that Emer couldn't do. She had little interaction with her mum and dad, with her siblings, and all the other people who loved her. This turned out to be her last year of life.
"All the challenges that brought for us as a family, like so many other people during the course of Covid, there were less than 10 people at Emer's funeral, in the huge church around the corner where we got married. That's a dominant part of my memory. It was really hard."
Emer passed away in 2021, a few years after her close friend Martha.
"Martha was a hugely important person in Emer's life. They were close friends - they had been in secondary school together, they came to medical school together, and they ended up both dying within two years of each other in their early fifties, the primes of their lives," Holohan said.
"It's hard not to think about that. The best of people."
Holahan, who had children Clodagh and Ronan with Emer, paid tribute to her dedication as a mother.
"Emer was a great mum, she really was," he said. "Everything that she did was for them - the things that she spent money on, the things she spent time on, all became about the two of them."
Holohan also addressed the CervicalCheck cancer scandal in 2018.
When asked by Courtney if anything could have been done differently, he said: "Cleary the first thing was where there was over 200 people who should have had information back, where cervical cancer had arisen, and where that information hadn't been shared with them.
"No one at the centre knew that until it all came to light in such a dramatic way in 2018. That was a breach of trust that simply shouldn't have happened."
Keys To My Life airs on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player at 8:30pm on Sunday 12 October.
