Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The point is that the Department does not have a culture of being forthcoming with information, in my experience. For example, I have tabled many questions on the same broad topic. If the first question had been answered it would have been to the Department's credit in terms of accountability. It looks like the same pattern will have pertained in relation to this. In other words, the Department would have had information but it was dismissed as almost fanciful and later transpired to be true. This does not build the type of confidence that the public should expect in terms of the disposal of very significant assets that have a bearing on the amount of taxation that needs to be raised, the level of our debt and so on. It is in that context I make the point about the Department having known about this in advance of questions being raised in the Dáil and its dismissal of those questions as fanciful.

The Department knew about the fixer's fees. Irrespective of whether Mr. Cushnahan was on the board the Department knew about those fixer's fees. The degree to which the Department has been forthcoming in real time about when the information became available is the point I am making. It was dismissed.