Mr. Noel McGree:

I wish to pick up on a point made by Deputy Durkan. I fully understand his referral to the fact that Ministers and politicians in general are in receipt of a huge amount of communications and their workload is large, but I wish to draw his attention to parliamentary questions that were asked by a committee member, Deputy Tóibín, and also by Deputy Catherine Murphy. This year they both tabled parliamentary questions to each Department to get a breakdown of the number of protected disclosures since 2016. Prior to 2016 the numbers were released following the statutory review that was conducted. There have been 510 protected disclosures between 2014 and now. If the answers to the parliamentary questions are correct and can be trusted and believed, that is what was identified through the questions tabled by Deputies Catherine Murphy and Tóibín.

A parliamentary question was asked about one of those protected disclosures. The Minister for Finance gave details, including the cost, which at that point was €55,000. The investigation was still ongoing at that time. A private firm was being paid to carry out an independent external investigation. The sum is a low and conservative figure, but if one multiplies it by the 510 protected disclosures that are being investigated, it comes to approximately €30 million of public funding going to private firms to investigate protected disclosures and produce reports that can then be just ignored, denied, challenged, forgotten and buried by civil servants because the findings are unpalatable or likewise if they say the civil servants did a great job and there is nothing to see here and they can be embraced. That is a lot of public money on only 510 protected disclosures since 2014. It is not an onerous task.

I accept the point that we are all human, from the Minister down the line, and we can all make mistakes. What members must begin to understand is that the mistake has catastrophic effects for the whistleblowers. We are destroyed mentally and financially. Our lifestyle and everything is gone. We are no more. My home was repossessed. My career is gone. My career involved a uniform, much like Mr. Wilson who is here today. He will know what I am talking about when I talk about being part of a uniformed branch of the State. The family or organisation I was part of was all taken away from me. The State is the only one that provides that service. There was no other Garda Síochána for Mr. Wilson to join. There was no other Prison Service for me to join. I cannot go and get another job. I am 25 years doing my job, which is a specific State job. One cannot walk out the door and go and work for somebody else when one falls out with one's employer. I just went off a cliff edge and I was left with nothing.

As bad as we all are here, the committee should have some sympathy for our wives, husbands, children and families who are suffering along with us and have been good enough to stand beside us and support us. It is one horrible, dangerous road to be cast aside and left alone. In this isolation and being left alone, the only person we are told to subscribe to is our Minister. If one stops a person in the street and asks them to name the Minister in a Department, there is a good chance he or she can say who the Minister is. People can say who their local Deputy is. Politicians are approachable to us and we can reach out to them. If one stops the same person in the street and asks them who is the Secretary General of each Department, he or she will not be able to say, because he or she does not know. These people are invisible oligarchs running the Departments with no accountability for the authority that they wield, so we must turn to politicians. What we are asking today is for those same politicians to stand up, represent us, protect us and take on board what we are saying.