Niall Collins (Limerick, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is a sad day when it is the Government's job to protect its citizens in the first instance.

We then had the situation regarding the Garda confidential recipient and the scandal of his departure. It has never been explained by the Minister or anybody else what exactly the former Garda confidential recipient, Mr. Oliver Connolly, was referring to in those taped transcripts. That is very serious. Mr. Connolly refuses to elaborate on it and the Minister has been offered many opportunities to elaborate on it but refuses to do so. It is another chapter in the catalogue.

Later today we will discuss the report of the Garda Inspectorate. Before it was laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas it was leaked. This shows blatant disregard for the Houses of the Oireachtas. The Minister had a row with the Judiciary. Whom has he not fought with? The Minister had to set up a special quango to mediate between himself and the Judiciary. The Garda Commissioner resigned under the Minister's watch. We thought we could come in here yesterday and have an opportunity to discuss the Garda Commissioner's resignation. It does not happen any old day. Yet there was no opportunity to discover it. Now we have the mishandling of the fact that telephone recordings have been undertaken in Garda stations for many years. Nobody is blaming the Minister for doing it, but people are blaming him for the mishandling of the fallout from it.

Every issue turns into a calamity and a crisis. Other people take the blame and responsibility, not the Minister. Yesterday it was reasonable to expect that we would have come in here to discuss the issues regarding the Garda Commissioner and his premature departure. Instead, the leaders of my party and Sinn Féin were summoned to meet the Taoiseach to be briefed on:

A new and very serious issue relating to An Garda Síochána. The implications of this matter are potentially of such gravity that the Government has decided to set up a statutory commission of investigation into this matter of significant public concern.

As yesterday unfolded, and as a series of events unravelled, it became clear that the Government knew about this for a long time. Why was this just conveniently dropped in there yesterday? The Minister and the Taoiseach must account for the departure of the Garda Commissioner and their treatment of the whistleblowers, yet this issue was dropped into the political mix yesterday when we know it was there for a long time. The Minister and Taoiseach are getting caught up in their own web of spin and beginning to meet themselves on the way back.

Are we to believe that the Minister did not know about the Garda station recordings until earlier this week? Are we to believe the Attorney General did not inform the Minister at the Government about this until recently? Are we to believe that the Department of Justice and Equality did not inform them? If the answer to all those questions is "yes", and we are to believe all that, it confirms clearly to us, the Opposition and the public that the Minister is presiding over an Administration that is driven completely by incompetence.

The Minister is a great legal mind and is lauded and applauded for that. He will know that ignorance of the law is no defence in any regard. Ignorance of the facts and events in this instance is not a defence either. While the party leaders were receiving the briefing yesterday, the facts of the Waterford case were in the public domain for weeks, months and years. The Waterford case was one of the first high-profile prosecutions taken by GSOC following an investigation of a complaint in which serving members of the Garda Síochána were convicted and imprisoned. It is not credible that the Minister did not know about it, that the Attorney General and the Minister's Department failed to inform him.

We can argue the rights and wrongs of whether the Minister should have been informed by the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, as the report was available on its website, but for the Minister to credibly state neither he nor his Department was aware of it just does not hold.

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