Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I asked the Minister a priority question on the 6th of that month and he responded on the record and set out the process, but he had already spoken to a lobbyist on behalf of INM on the 11th, and that is what he has told us on the record. Did it not strike him as strange that this lobbyist was telling him what the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission was going to do? Given that the Minister has a quasi-judicial function in this particular matter, would he not have realised that he needed to say, "I cannot talk to you on this issue because this decision is part of a process", the process that the Minister outlined to me? Does the Minister accept that by talking to him and telling what he did tell him, namely, that it would probably go to the BAI, he misled the Dáil when he came in here on the 6th and outlined the process without telling us that?

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