Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

All I can do at this stage is restate and remind the House of what I said previously, first, that the Tánaiste had no hand, act or part in the legal strategy pursued by the former Garda Commissioner. There is an attempt in some way to suggest in this House and other places that the State or State entities were acting in collusion or all acting together. That is not the case. The Garda has its own legal team and advice, as the Commissioner at the time did, and the Department has its legal team and advice. They are separate legal entities and particularly in the context of a tribunal or commission, they have to act separately and cannot interfere in one another's legal position. The Tánaiste, and we know this from the email of 15 May 2015, did not have any knowledge that such a legal strategy was being pursued until that email was sent on 15 May. That is after opening statements, after the fact, after the hearings were already under way.

The question Deputy Martin may ask is why the Tánaiste did not intervene, why she did not contact the Garda Commissioner or the Garda or do so through officials. The reason this was not done is in the email. The answer is given to Deputy Martin in the last paragraph of that email of 15 May: the Attorney General and the Minister were advised by officials that they had no function in this. As Deputy Martin knows, under the rules of a commission of investigation, it is an offence to release evidence from a commission and to try to interfere in the work of a commission or tribunal of inquiry.

I spoke to Sergeant McCabe last night. It was a relatively brief conversation. We spoke for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes. I felt, out of a courtesy to him, given that once again, through no fault of his own, he was at the centre of a major controversy, that he had a right to know what was in the email, at least before it was handed out in this House. I read the email out to him. He disputes its contents. He says these criminal allegations concerning sex abuse were not raised that day and not raised at all at the O'Higgins commission. He says the transcripts of the O'Higgins commission will show this. This leaves us all a little confused because we do not even know if the contents of the email were accurate. It was an email reporting a conversation between an official in the Department of Justice and Equality and the Attorney General's office. What was written in the email and sent to the Tánaiste was second-party or even third-party information. As Deputy Martin will know, Sergeant McCabe disputes that the issue that arose in the IRM, the criminal allegations, were ever raised at the O'Higgins commission.

Why did the Tánaiste not act? She did not act for the reasons I have given the Deputy. However, she did act in other ways: she established the Policing Authority, one of the most major reforms to have occurred in Irish policing in recent years; she asked the Policing Authority to take an interest in bringing about new procedures and guidelines as to how whistleblowers could be listened to and protected within the Garda; she brought in Transparency International, the leading organisation dealing with corruption and the protection of whistleblowers; and she did what a Minister should do, that is, not to interfere in a commission or try to influence someone else's legal strategy, but to try to change things and put the right procedures and new practices in place.

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