Niall Collins (Limerick, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to these statements. The administration of justice under the Minister's watch is in crisis and has been for a long time through a series of the Minister's actions, inaction and incompetence. That makes the Minister unfit to continue to hold office. We need to recap on the catalogue of events the Minister has overseen. We had the completely bungled handling of the penalty points issue. Were it not for the clear, independent report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Minister would have proceeded along the line that there was no issue there. He would have continued in that vein but for the fact that the independent constitutional office of the Comptroller and Auditor General did its work and reported coherently.

We then had the issue on the alleged bugging of GSOC. The Minister immediately moved to turn the potential victim of a scandal into a villain. He put GSOC chairman Simon O'Brien into the dock. He brought in an outside company to second-guess some of the work GSOC did. That undermined GSOC's role, and people are aggrieved by that. There was the ongoing treatment by the Minister and the Government of the whistleblowers. Is it not the job of any government in a modern democracy to seek to protect the citizens and their good names, reputations, characters and integrity? The Minister failed, and continues to fail, to do that. He is not owning up to his responsibility. Some of the other Cabinet Ministers, the Labour Party Ministers in particular and the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Leo Varadkar, are living up to their responsibilities but the Minister, Deputy Shatter and the Taoiseach cannot bring themselves, as two of the most powerful people in the Cabinet, to do right by two decent citizens of this country.

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