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

I would certainly be happy to sit down with the Deputy between now and Christmas and talk to him about housing. I acknowledge it is an area in which the Deputy has much more experience than I do so I would be happy to take him up on that particular offer.

I have no doubt the Deputy can come to the House with all sorts of terrifying allegations about malpractice and misconduct among gardaí. I welcome the Deputy having the opportunity to do that. The difficulty we always have on this side of the House, when one is in an Executive position, is that one has to first establish which allegations are true and which are not. We know from the O'Higgins commission that allegations made by whistleblowers are not always true. We will know that from the outcome of the Charleton tribunal. We cannot operate in government on the basis that every time somebody comes with an allegation that would make the hair on one's neck stand up, it must be true. Equally, we cannot operate on the basis that it is not true. We cannot dismiss serious allegations because so many of them turn out to be true. We always need to have in place some sort of process or system whereby we can take allegations seriously and then try to identify which ones are true, which ones stack up and which ones do not, and act on them from there.

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