Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Indeed, and we hope that the Clare ladies will be in an All-Ireland final too. Mr. Shatter was able to say that Mr. Wallace had committed, I believe, a road traffic offence at the Five Lamps and was pulled over. This was information he had gleaned from the then Garda Commissioner.

Equally worrying, or even more worrying in some respects, the House may recall that, in the lifetime of this Dáil and during Deputy McEntee’s tenure as Minister for Justice, the then Vice President of the European Commission attended a golf dinner of the Oireachtas Golf Society, as it was called, in Clifden. There was terrible consternation. A couple of journalists basically told the world they were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for their efforts in unearthing the seating plan. All hell broke loose and the hysteria we are now seeing around RTÉ was in the ether. Nothing less than Mr. Phil Hogan’s head was going to satisfy the masses.

I do not always agree with the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, but one of the few things I would agree with him on was how he desisted from calling for Mr. Hogan’s head. However, the leader of the party of which the Minister, Deputy McEntee, is a member, who was Tánaiste at the time, did call for his head. Fianna Fáil taoisigh are generally fair-minded, but the Tánaiste, who held the exalted position of Head of Government as Taoiseach at the time, called for Mr. Hogan’s head because we needed heads and heads were the only thing that would satiate the masses. We wanted Mr. Hogan’s head on a pole somewhere.

It then transpired that he had been apprehended for a road traffic offence. I do not mean to denigrate road traffic offences, as they can be very serious and every offence is, by definition, serious, but his offence was one of driving with a mobile phone in his hand. It was a serious offence, but one that did not threaten the security of the State. He was not apprehended with a bag of Kalashnikovs in his boot. It was with a mobile phone to his ear. There was no suggestion that he was going to overthrow the authority of the State or summon the people to him at Clifden golf course to overthrow the State and once and for all create a new state, be it the "State of Phil" or whatever. He was making a phone call. It was wrong and I am not condoning it.

I am not in the Cabinet, but I understand that this information made its way to the Minister, Deputy McEntee, and the Cabinet.

Of course, it greatly assisted the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste in solving their problem. They were bolstered by this information of an alleged offence that a Vice President of the Commission had carried out of driving with a mobile phone to his ear. This was dynamite. It was almost up there with the arms trial back in the day in terms of the amount of attention it attracted. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the Commission, was written to. I say very squarely that this was an abuse of information. Abuses of information should not happen. The Minister has never explained how it happened. It needs to be explained. If it happens once it can happen twice. If it happens twice it can happen a lot of times. It has happened twice in my very brief period in here. I do not know how many abuses of such information there have been during my career. By the way, for the avoidance of any doubt, I am not suggesting that Deputy Howlin ever abused information that he obtained but it is open to abuse.

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