Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister would also have been conscious of the fact that the Comptroller and Auditor General had vindicated Sergeant McCabe in regard to the penalty point issue. The contrast between the outcome of the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the outcome of the O'Mahony report could not be more stark, yet the Minister proceeded to make the allegations he made.

I have with me a document I received this morning from Sergeant McCabe, which, as I do not have the time to go through it all in the time available to me, I propose to lay before the House for others to read.

Basically, he was a year trying to stop the practice of senior Garda officers terminating fixed charges illegally and so forth. Assistant Commissioner O'Mahoney or his team never contacted, interviewed, called, telephoned, texted, e-mailed, faxed or visited Sergeant McCabe. That is from Maurice McCabe himself and I am putting it on the record. Some gardaí in Sergeant McCabe's station in Mullingar were contacted and questioned regarding terminations they had carried out. Yet they said they did not meet with any of the investigation team. Does the Minister believe he should apologise for what he said? Does he believe he should, at a minimum, withdraw what he said in respect of the whistleblower? Could he not simply say he was wrong and that he made a mistake? In many ways, the Minister put the Commissioner and others in the firing line unnecessarily and in an unedifying way and we have ended up with rather a Jesuitical interpretation about a direction given in December of last year. It is crazy stuff and there is no need for that type of behaviour. The Minister has been retrospectively trying to justify trawling every record that he could to try to find an e-mail or some letter that would get him off the hook from misleading the Dáil.

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