The Social Democrats have said the T\u00e1naiste\u2019s position is untenable in the light of further documents released tonight about Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe.<\/p>\n
The party\u2019s co-leader R\u00f3is\u00edn Shortall TD said:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sheer extent of the T\u00e1naiste\u2019s dereliction of her duty as Minister for Justice is laid bare in the chain of emails released tonight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe correspondence shows that a senior official in the Minister\u2019s department liaised with the then Garda Commissioner about media queries about the Garda Commissioner\u2019s role in the aggressive legal stance towards Sgt McCabe at the O\u2019Higgins Commission.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever about a Minister not recalling an issue being raised once in an email, this departmental trawl shows that both the Minister and her officials were informed in another two further emails, and in considerable detail, about media inquiries about the legal strategy adopted by the Garda Commissioner.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can the T\u00e1naiste continue to credibly maintain that she wasn\u2019t aware of the legal strategy, despite her officials and her special advisers being included in the email chain released tonight?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is incomprehensible that neither Ms Fitzgerald nor her political advisers appear not to have grasped the seriousness of the issues at the time, particularly given the backdrop of the resignation of both Martin Callinan and Alan Shatter arising from the denigration of Sgt McCabe.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the time what was badly needed was a courageous Minister who would implement wide-ranging reform of both the Garda and the Department of Justice. Instead, we got a minister who sat on her hands and seems to have been led and said by her department officials.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Taoiseach also needs to explain what he was told about this latest series of emails last Friday night and why these emails were not released at that point and\u00a0 why he continued to defend the T\u00e1naiste.\u201d<\/p>\n
ENDS<\/p>\n
27 November 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Social Democrats have said the T\u00e1naiste\u2019s position is untenable in the light of further documents released tonight about Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe. The party\u2019s co-leader R\u00f3is\u00edn Shortall TD said: \u201cThe sheer extent of the T\u00e1naiste\u2019s dereliction of her duty as Minister for Justice is laid bare in the chain of emails released tonight. \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[238,70,239],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-news","category-press-release","tag-garda-commissioner","tag-roisin-shortall-td","tag-sgt-mccabe"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n