John Brady (Wicklow, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister came before the committee last week and, in my view, made a deliberate attempt to mislead it. He claimed that at no time did he feel Katherine Zappone was lobbying for a job.

Yet it is abundantly clear that Ms Zappone not only sought a plum position that would grant her access to the UN but also undertook a campaign to lobby for that position. She lobbied the Minister, Deputy Coveney, she lobbied the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, she lobbied the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, she even lobbied senior diplomats such as the Irish ambassador to the the UN, Geraldine Byrne Nason, and the Minister, Deputy Coveney, and his ministerial colleagues delivered for Ms Zappone. What has been revealed is nothing more than plain, old-fashioned political strokes which, when uncovered, led to a scramble for cover by the Minister, his officials and indeed other Ministers, deleting messages, changing stories, changing their narrative and providing misleading statements, as the Minister did last week, which has ultimately taken us to where we are now. The Minister sought to downplay his role in the entire process. As for other senior Fine Gael people it is eminently clear now that the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, knew exactly what was going on around this appointment at least four months before Cabinet and the Tánaiste knew at least 11 days before the Cabinet meeting. As I said, the Minister misled the committee last week when he said clearly that he did not relay anything to Katherine Zappone - "I did not speak to her when she was in Dublin"; that in and around 21 February was the last time he spoke to Ms Zappone; and that he essentially left the entire process up to his officials at that point. The published data now graphically show an entirely different story from the yarn the Minister has tried to spin not just to the committee members but to the public as a whole.

I have a number of questions I want to put to the Minister. I want to follow up on that initial point on the cooling-off period, which is very important because in the Minister's evidence last week he stated that in a conversation he had with Katherine Zappone last summer she had offered her services in a private or professional capacity to his Department, to him and to the work the Department is doing at a UN level. Again I put the question to him: What exactly did he do at that point to challenge Katherine Zappone in terms of the lobbying, the legislation and the requirement for cooling off? Did the Minister point out at that stage that this was a breach of the legislation?