Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The events of the last week have highlighted serious failures in the Department of Justice and Equality and in the Government. It is worrying to see how badly the dysfunctional Department and the Government have acted on this issue. This crisis has been exacerbated by the behaviour of Fine Gael, which has completely denied that there is a major problem here. The resignation of the former Tánaiste yesterday was the right decision in light of emails that revealed that she, and the Department she headed at the time, had far too close a connection with the legal strategy of the Garda Commissioner against Maurice McCabe. Leaving aside the issues with the strategic communications of members of the Government in recent days, it is alarming that these emails have come to light as a result of this controversy and were not passed to the disclosures tribunal in February when it called for all relevant documents to be submitted. If Members of the Oireachtas had not persisted and RTÉ's Katie Hannon had not kept on top of this issue, I doubt very much that these emails would ever have made it to the tribunal. Given that the Department of Justice and Equality set up the tribunal, it is even more unbelievable that these documents somehow remained hidden for many months. Many more questions on this issue remain to be answered. The resignation of the former Tánaiste does not answer them. It is just not believable that these emails were accidentally missed.

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