A spokesperson for the Department of Health has insisted that Minister Stephen Donnelly has not paid for likes and retweets on Twitter.
A video was posted to his official account on Tuesday afternoon in which the minister spoke about the Cabinet sign-off on the new National Maternity Hospital.
In the video, he said: “This morning, the Government agreed to proceed with the building of the new National Maternity Hospital. It’s a really important decision and the new hospital is going to be central to women’s healthcare into the future.
READ MORE: Cabinet signs off on controversial deal for new National Maternity Hospital
“We’ve heard over the last while just how much of a difference it’s going to make.
“So now what we gotta do is focus on moving ahead, we’ve had planning permission in place for the last five years, believe it or not. Now we need to move on, get going and get the hospital built.”
After only a few minutes, it had 200 retweets but many users began to point out that most of the pages retweeting had no followers or were spam accounts.
On Tuesday evening the Department of Health said that neither it nor the minister has ever paid for likes or retweets.
The spokesperson told the Irish Independent: “Neither the Department nor the Minister have paid for any promotional activity in relation to his social media accounts.”
The spokesperson did not offer an explanation for the hundreds of retweets on the message a matter of minutes after being posted.
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