Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome. I welcome the clarity of her statement, which is no less than I would have expected from somebody of the Minister's integrity.She is well known in this country as a politician with great integrity and honesty and her stature has been reinforced this week. After the week's events, I find that hers is one of the only voices in the Government I can believe. Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot believe a blind word that comes from the mouth of the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste.

I was previously a primary school principal. We stored files in the school and the place where the filing cabinet held them was probably the most sacred in the entire school. Nobody had access to it; nobody went near it and nobody was allowed to take anything out of the filing cabinet without making sure it would be put straight back in again. Anybody who gained access to the room was strictly overseen by me and people working with me. That a cut-and-paste effort in the case of one child could be misplaced in a file on another is absolutely unthinkable in a small primary school with 100 children. Of all the files in all the world, it is just not credible that a cut-and-paste effort could find its way into Sergeant Maurice McCabe's file. The problem, as alluded to by Senator Rose Conway-Walsh, is that citizens now believe the State will find a way to take them down if it considers they are a threat.

I can appreciate the difficulties the Minister is having because my party and I went through this for five years in dealing with shambolic handling of justice issue after justice issue. We had to keep the show on the road because there was an economic crisis and it was not worth plunging the country into a general election because of the nature of what we were dealing with. However, we had a Minister for justice on the bloody television leaking bits of information on what he knew about how a Dáil Deputy had behaved in using his mobile phone at traffic lights. Then the Taoiseach effectively fired the Garda Commissioner without telling anybody in either party in government, including the Tánaiste. It was absolutely outrageous. We had to drag Fine Gael Members kicking and screaming into accepting any concession or change in the justice portfolio. They did not want to know about the proposal to establish a policing authority until they were shamed into accepting it.