Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I certainly will be on this side of the House.

I have no confidence in the Taoiseach or the Government. I am sure he is not surprised by that statement but it does not just relate to the despicable treatment of Maurice McCabe and other whistleblowers over the past decade. I also have no confidence in the Government in terms of the housing and homelessness crisis. Nor have I any confidence in the Government in the context of waiting lists and the health crisis in general or workers' rights. On Monday, workers in Bus Éireann will most likely be forced into a strike while the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport maintains the farcical attitude that it has nothing to do with him.

On the treatment of whistleblowers, I was among a small group of Deputies that first raised the issue of the abuse of penalty points within An Garda Síochána. I will defer to the ruling of the Committee on Procedures and Privileges on naming people, but at the time a journalist contacted me to fish for information on whether there had ever been an incident in my previous employment in the GPO, which there had not. Other journalists inquired if, and hinted in a way that, my partner had sought favours from relations in An Garda Síochána. Again, there was no basis to the matter. There was a campaign to discredit Deputies Clare Daly and Wallace and former Deputy Luke "Ming" Flanagan. There was not just a campaign to discredit Maurice McCabe and John Wilson, the other whistleblower involved, there was also one to intimidate them.

John Wilson had the deep displeasure, at the height of the penalty points issue in January 2013, of finding that a dead rat had been tied to the handle of the front door to his family home in the middle of the night. Everyone knows the connotations associated with a rat. There were also pictures of gardaí playing with a stuffed rat called Maurice on Facebook. If anything was disgusting in this whole episode, it was actions of this kind and worse against Maurice McCabe and his family. For the O'Higgins report, we had lawyers acting under the instruction of Nóirín O'Sullivan and claims were fabricated that Maurice McCabe privately admitted making allegations of misconduct out of malice. If he had not had his recording, Maurice McCabe would have been destroyed and people knew it.

I have no confidence in Fianna Fáil or the Labour Party either. The Labour Party sat on its hands for five years in respect of this matter. Fianna Fáil warmly applauded Paul Williams at the conference in 2013 when he stood up and criticised Deputy Wallace and Luke "Ming" Flanagan for criticising An Garda Síochána. What Pauline conversion has the Taoiseach had? He has been found out. That is all. The Taoiseach may win the vote on the motion of confidence but he should walk out on the streets and find out exactly what is people's mood in the country.

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