Sinn Féin would not have objected to a Cabinet decision to seek the resignation of former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan, party leader Gerry Adams has said.
The party’s deputy leader, Mary Lou McDonald, said during the debate on the motion of confidence in Taoiseach Enda Kenny that the commissioner’s “goose was cooked” when he described Garda whistleblowers as “disgusting”.
Ms McDonald claimed the Taoiseach knew he should have gone to Cabinet to state his case and allow a collective decision “that I believe would have been inevitable in respect of the Garda commissioner”.
Addressing Mr Kenny during the three- hour debate, she said: “I believe you were spooked or maybe even because you were furious with him again for landing you in it, you decided to do things your own way.”
She said she had some sympathy for the position the Taoiseach found himself in during March this year.
“From the moment the former commissioner attended the Public Accounts Committee and felt that the whistleblowers John Wilson and Maurice McCabe were ‘disgusting’, [from] the moment he chose to stand over that disgusting remark, the commissioner’s goose was cooked,” she said.
“It is my view that the commissioner had to go,” Ms McDonald added. “His credibility was shot. Public confidence in him and by extension, unfortunately, in the Garda . . . was under incredible pressure.”
But she said the Taoiseach chose “to put a serving senior civil servant under the most incredible pressure to do something and to carry out an instruction that he believed to be wrong. That’s the term he used – ‘wrong’,” she said of former Department of Justice general secretary Brian Purcell, who went to Mr Callinan’s home last March.
Proxy dirty work
“And you used that individual as a proxy as a mechanism to do your dirty work for you,” she said. “You put arm’s length and deniable distance between yourself and the resignation of the commissioner. And I believe you did that in a very deliberate and a very calculated fashion.”
Mr Adams said Sinn Féin would not have objected or complained if the Taoiseach had gone to the Cabinet and moved a motion to seek Mr Callinan’s resignation, given the months of scandals and resignations leading up to his retirement.
“He should have given the commissioner the opportunity to give his side of the story . . . He should have consulted the justice minister,” he added.
He said the Taoiseach’s dubious actions and those of his inner circle had led to unavoidable comparisons with Fianna Fáil’s style of government.
Mr Kenny was not straight with the commissioner and was not straight with the minister for justice, Mr Adams said. And he carried that “lack of straightness” into the Dáil debate.
