Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

-----because no recovery is evident there and the hardship that families are undergoing is real. The Government's half-hearted, mealy-mouthed nod in the direction of those families is, at this stage, insulting. If the Government were politically smart, it would stop doing that.

Now I come to the Fennelly report itself. For a person who has talked up Fennelly, the Taoiseach demonstrated a marked reluctance to come clean and give all the information to that commission. I have some sympathy for the position in which he has found himself. When the former Commissioner attended the Committee of Public Accounts and said the whistleblowers Maurice McCabe and John Wilson were "disgusting" - that was the word he used - I gave him the opportunity to withdraw or qualify those remarks and he refused to do so. In my view, the moment that he chose to stand over that "disgusting" remark, the Commissioner's goose was cooked, if I could use that expression. It is my view that the Commissioner had to go. His credibility was shot and public confidence in him and, by extension, in the Garda at the time, was under incredible pressure. I think that Commissioner had to leave.

What Fennelly demonstrates very clearly is the truly remarkable turn of events where the Taoiseach chose to put a serving senior civil servant under the most incredible pressure to carry out an instruction that he believed to be wrong. That is the term he used: "wrong". The Taoiseach used that individual as a proxy, as a mechanism to do his dirty work. He put arms-length and deniable distance between himself and the resignation of the Commissioner. I believe he did that in a very deliberate and very calculated fashion. I think he was conscious of the provisions in law under the Garda Síochána Act 2005. He knew that what he should have done was to go to the Cabinet, state his case and allow the Cabinet to take a decision that I believe would have been inevitable in respect of the Garda Commissioner. However, because the Taoiseach was spooked, or maybe even because he was furious with the Commissioner for landing him in it again, he decided to do things his own way. He said at the beginning of his own contribution that he welcomed the fact that Fennelly expressed confidence in the Government and in the Attorney General. The Fennelly report does nothing of the sort. Yes, it falls short of saying that the Taoiseach said, man to man, Taoiseach to Commissioner, "You must go". He did not do that, but he unquestionably sent a person on his behalf to deliver that message. He had lost confidence in the Commissioner and the Commissioner had to go, which is precisely what happened.

Fennelly is absolutely damning in respect of the Attorney General. Fennelly says, in his own words, that he was left perplexed by the evidence given, and subsequently modified, by the Attorney General. The Attorney General, the senior law officer in the State, the legal adviser to Government, left Fennelly perplexed because of the nature of her testimony. He was perplexed by her inconsistencies and by the fact that she had to revise her testimony. He was equally perplexed at the fact that the Attorney General took it upon herself, unilaterally it seems, not to inform a serving Minister of matters of which she should have informed him. This House will know I do not hold a candle for the former Minister, Deputy Shatter; far from it. That is not the point. The point is that he was the duly appointed member of the Cabinet but the Attorney General sidestepped all of that. It is a matter of some concern to me that when we raise important issues like this, for a senior office-holder such as the Attorney General, the Government tries to bat them away and to depict them as nit-picking by the Opposition or the Opposition looking for a soft target. People properly expect that the Taoiseach operates not just within the letter of the law, in this case the Garda Síochána Act 2005, but also the spirit of that law, and we should expect that the Attorney General discharges her functions competently, fully, in accordance with established procedures and in recognition of the office she holds. Fennelly reflects that this was not the case. The Government's word of the season, which we have picked up on, is "chaos", which it attributes to those of us on this side of the Dáil. If ever there was irony, that is it. The chaos within the Department of Justice and Equality; the chaotic manner in which the Taoiseach convened that meeting in March - the one he had no notes on; the absolute chaos of applying onerous pressure on a civil servant to go, under cover of darkness, to deliver the Taoiseach's message to the Commissioner; the chaos of his Attorney General giving information to a commission, revisiting it, and deciding she would not communicate information to a senior Minister - that chaotic scenario is just a sample of the generalised chaos in which the Taoiseach operates. The really tragic thing - I will finish on this - and the reason we support a motion of no confidence in the Taoiseach, is that the chaotic enterprise that is his Government has delivered not only chaos but also huge hardship the length and breadth of this State.

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