House of Guards
House of Guards
There are questions still to be answered about the handling of the Garda Tapes scandal. Is it possible that Alan Shatter was deliberately kept out of the loop?
There are questions still to be answered about the handling of the Garda Tapes scandal. Is it possible that Alan Shatter was deliberately kept out of the loop?
Image: Oireachtas TV
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Rome was not built in a day, but as any architect knows: it’s far easier to destroy than to build. Alan Shatter has spent decades building his political reputation, which after ten tumultuous days lies in precarious shape — with another batch of crises potentially looming around the corner.
On Friday March 21, the country’s political press corps were spread across various trains to Killarney for Fianna Fáil’s Ard Fheis when word spread that the Data Protection Commissioner was shortly to issue a report on the Garda PULSE system and the legitimacy with which it was being accessed at certain times. The phones of some began to hop: there was a suspicion that the official response from the Garda Commissioner, Martin Callinan, might address the hot topic of the day.
A day earlier, transport minister Leo Varadkar spoke at a road safety event and touched upon the subject of penalty points, which was the subject of a report from the Garda Inspectorate the previous week. (That report had offered a partial vindication of the work of Sergeant Maurice McCabe and retired Garda John Wilson, who for two years had been raising concerns about corrupt workings in the system through which they are cancelled.) Varadkar told his audience if there was one word he would use to describe the two officers, it was “distinguished”. That certainly wasn’t the word chosen by the man at the top of the Garda tree.
Martin Callinan had opted for a different D-word when asked to describe their actions two months previously. At the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee in January, the 60-year-old engaged with Shane Ross on the manner in which the problems with penalty points had been brought into the public arena.
His choice of words was not whimsical. The official written record does not suggest it, but the footage clearly does: he said the word not once, but twice. Later, he was asked if he really meant it. He was clear:
“It is a strong term. It reflects my view.”
By that Friday morning, Varadkar was not alone: he was publicly backed by Labour’s Joan Burton, then by a spokeswoman for the Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, and then by Pat Rabbitte. Seeking to stem the tide, Enda Kenny sought to advise (but not admonish) by telling ministers he would rather see them air their grievances at Cabinet and not through the airwaves. A few hours later, Ruairí Quinn issued an unprompted statement backing his Labour comrades, and that night a spokeswoman for Brendan Howlin completed the Grand Slam of Labour ministers seeking a retraction.
This presented something of a problem for the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter. In all of the various scandals that had hit An Garda Síochána and the broader policing system in the previous few months — the prospect of the Garda Ombudsman Commission being bugged; suggestions of corruption in the penalty points system; the suggestion that Maurice McCabe had ignored a direction to co-operate with the internal Garda inquiry; allegations that Gardaí had failed to act on a dossier of damning inaction — Callinan and Shatter had spoken with one voice. The Irish Times’ Miriam Lord described them as “twin egos”. Any political pressure on Callinan to change tack was, in essence, a back-door call on Shatter to do the same.
The Labour ministers would have to wait, however. Martin Callinan’s response to the Data Protection Commissioner report made no mention of Messrs McCabe and Wilson, or his own characterisation of his actions. As it happened, the commissioner himself Billy Hawkes went on RTÉ’s News at One and softly concurred that Gardaí were doing nothing illegal by sharing internal data with a TD.
By Saturday evening there were other things on journalists’ plates. Micheál Martin’s keynote speech to the Fianna Fáil Ard Fheis had us searching vainly for a lede, and independent TD Patrick Nulty had announced his abrupt resignation while the Sunday World prepared an expose about his inappropriate messages to some female constituents, including a 17-year-old. But amid that flurry, there were yet more signals emanating from Garda HQ. The Irish Sunday Mirror eschewed the Nulty bombshell and instead led with the news that Callinan would be issuing a retraction.
But by Sunday afternoon the signals were being diluted. Enda Kenny’s political enforcer, Phil Hogan, went on radio and backed Callinan to the hilt. Whether Hogan was already aware of Callinan’s plans is unknown — but the impact was crystal clear. By that evening, the same informed sources close to the Garda Commissioner were now unequivocal: there would be no statement, and no withdrawal of the ‘disgusting’ remark.
We now know, in hindsight, that there were ‘contacts’ between Callinan and the Department of Justice which turned Callinan’s mind against the idea of withdrawing his remark. The Department of Justice stressed that the final decision on whether to make a statement was always left up to Callinan himself, and that it (effectively) insisted it did not threaten any veto. We don’t know whether Alan Shatter was party to any of this communication, or indeed whether he was one of the people with whom Callinan consulted.
But by that Sunday evening there were bigger issues coming to the fore.
It’s fair to suspect that Enda Kenny’s prime concern last Sunday morning was the burgeoning Cabinet civil war over Callinan’s ‘disgusting’ comment.
The Taoiseach was in Dublin on the Sunday evening to attend an engagement at the Conrad Hotel and, while in Dublin, rang the Attorney General, Máire Whelan, to discuss other issues. (Whelan, the Taoiseach later said, was in work preparing ‘as usual’ for the following Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting — which, in an distinctly unusual turn of events, she would miss in favour of a private family occasion.)
Whelan told Kenny that there was one item of business which she was unwilling to discuss on the phone. A face-to-face meeting was arranged, at which Whelan explained the looming bombshell that conversations on phone lines at Garda stations had been secretly (or perhaps not-so-secretly) recording conversations for 30 years.
The implications would be enormous. If a confession had been extracted from a suspect using information partially gleamed from covert tape recordings, the conviction could potentially be overturned. Given the scale of the recordings — initiated in the 1980s and ended only in November 2013 — the potential case load would be substantial, and the effects on the criminal justice system simply gigantic.
Enda Kenny later explained his actions thusly:
I advised the Attorney General that all of the facts both of the individual case and the wider trawl should be assessed by somebody competent in the legal profession to see how serious the issue was. As I informed Deputy Micheál Martin, that was done all day Monday.
The next day, Eamon Gilmore — who had no knowledge of the storm about to land — had stirred the whistleblower pot even further. At a GAA function in Croke Park, he had not only told reporters that Callinan should withdraw his ‘disgusting’ remark, but that Alan Shatter should follow suit and retract some of his own. Five months previously, Shatter had told the Dáil that Maurice McCabe and John Wilson “did not co-operate with the Garda investigations that took place.” In fact, it was established almost immediately that neither had been asked for input.
So while the press corps was preparing its Tuesday morning material, focussing largely on Labour’s now explicit demands for Alan Shatter to withdraw his remarks, a bigger scandal was brewing.
An interlude at this point. RTÉ reported on Tuesday evening that Callinan had in fact sent a letter by courier to Brian Purcell a full fortnight earlier (on March 10) outlining the full scale of phone recording. This outlined precisely how there were 2,485 tapes, which were superseded by a digital recording system in 2008, and how the scheme had been discontinued on November 27, 2013.
It outlined how an internal Garda working group had been set up to discuss the issue, and that this was prompted by a report from the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission five months earlier, which outlined how all calls on one line in Waterford Garda Station had been illegally recorded. Explicitly, it has since emerged, it revealed that three phone calls between Gardaí and Marie Farrell — a witness in the 1996 murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier — had been recorded, and that these had come to light in the course of a civil case being taken against the State by Ian Bailey, who had been acquitted of du Plantier’s murder.
Perhaps crucially, the letter also explicitly asked that Alan Shatter be informed.
With Shatter’s trip to Mexico for St Patrick’s Day, and other extenuating personal circumstances on the part of senior figures within the Department, this letter did not make it into Shatter’s hands for another 15 days.
On the Monday evening — having seemingly received the feedback of the anonymous senior counsel — Kenny convened a meeting with Shatter, Whelan, and the secretaries-general of Kenny and Shatter’s departments: Martin Fraser, the ex officio cabinet secretary, and Brian Purcell.
(It’s worth noting that the precise time at which this meeting was held is unclear. Shatter’s spokeswoman asserted later in the week that he had learned of the tapes on Monday ‘shortly after 6pm’. Whether this is the actual time of the meeting is unknown. It is reasonable to suggest that, if Shatter were told any earlier, it would have been Brian Purcell who told him.)
This quinpartite meeting ended with Brian Purcell being sent to the home of Martin Callinan to relay the Taoiseach’s concerns.
We do not have a précis of Callinan’s reply — but one suspects, when faced with a political onslaught, Callinan might have pointed to the letter he had written to Purcell a fortnight earlier, outlining the full extent of the taping and the circumstances surrounding its beginning and end. He might, earnestly, have wondered whether those details had been shared with Alan Shatter. Indeed, he may have asked outright whether the letter had even been passed on at all.
Purcell again spoke to Callinan on Tuesday morning, confirming that the government’s position had not changed. Before 9am that morning, Callinan — only seven months into a 24-month extension of his tenure — had decided to retire with immediate effect.
The ‘disgusting’ remark remained on the record.
Ordinarily, reporters waiting outside Government Buildings on a Tuesday morning are granted a brief ‘doorstep’ interview with a few ministers who stop on their way into Cabinet. Eamon Gilmore’s challenge to Shatter made for a tense prelude. Unusually, but not unexpectedly, not a single minister stopped for questions on Tuesday March 25.
Cabinet usually begins at 10am, with a few bilateral meetings in the hours beforehand. Tuesday’s meeting began slightly later, as Enda Kenny had arranged a bilateral meeting with Eamon Gilmore, informing him of the Garda tapes and briefing him on their potential impact. Around the same time, news began to break about Martin Callinan’s abrupt departure.
Journalists — myself included — assumed the political pressure to withdraw the ‘disgusting’ remark was what led to his resignation. His position had become hopelessly undermined, I reported on Today FM: Callinan could either stand his ground, and openly ignore the demands of half the Cabinet, or he could concede and withdraw the remark, and leave his position hopelessly politicised. The truth, it shortly turned out, was far more complex.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet meeting was ongoing — and in fact ended only at around 1:30pm, a relatively late finish, especially given that Shatter was due in the Dáil chamber to take questions as the Minister for Defence by 2pm.
Shatter’s spokeswoman later said the minister had only been given Callinan’s letter — outlining the full extent of the concerns — at 12:40pm, and that he only got to read it later that day. This would suggest that Shatter got the letter during Cabinet, and only had a chance to read it properly once Cabinet had concluded. Moreover, it would suggest that Shatter’s Cabinet colleagues were flying blind — discussing the tapes and ordering a Commission of Inquiry without the benefit of the details offered by Callinan a fortnight earlier.
(Joan Burton would later tell me that ministers only had the briefings from Kenny and Shatter to go on; it was simply up to other ministers to trust them and assume they were being briefed as comprehensively as possible. Burton, for her part, seemed satisfied with the accounts offered by the Taoiseach and Minister.)
Shatter ultimately got out of Cabinet in time to take his prescheduled Dáil business. While he was on his feet, the Government issued a statement outlining how the Cabinet had been formally told of the taping scandal, and how it had ordered a Commission of Inquiry.
For a few hours the public was left to assume that Callinan’s departure was actually enforced by the political pressure over the ‘disgusting’ remark. For another few hours we were to assume that he had stepped down to avoid the storm that would follow when the taping issue became public. Later, when RTÉ revealed Callinan’s letter, the public’s mind was turned: the Commissioner had done his bit to stop the scheme and inform the Minister of his actions. If the ball had been dropped, it was within the Department of Justice.
In the middle of the Tuesday furore, the GSOC report from June 2013 began to resurface.
The report (perhaps misleadingly) described itself in such legal terms as to suggest that Alan Shatter would have been sent a copy of the report when it was first issued, nine months earlier, outlining a systematic operation in one major Garda station were all calls were recorded — most of them “in breach of the relevant statute” (i.e. illegally). It took GSOC until Wednesday morning to confirm that Shatter had not been sent this report, though its spokeswoman stressed that the full report had been placed online for anyone to see.
The delay was enough. Sinn Féin held a 10pm press conference pointing out that Shatter might have been aware of the dubious taping for nine months already. The heat was back on the Minister for Justice, who was due in the Dáil at 10:45am the following (Wednesday) morning to address the issue.
Shatter’s speech was textbook Shatter, but markedly defensive in his tone. This system was in place since the 1980s, he said — I have no way of knowing whether previous ministers, or previous governments, were aware of what had happened. How dare the opposition try to turn this into a political issue? How dare they degrade a matter of such grave importance to the status of partisan squabbles?
Unsurprisingly, the taping issue dominated the Leaders’ Questions session that followed. Micheál Martin asked the Taoiseach to confirm some of the details claimed in the media in the meantime (Callinan letter’s to Purcell, Purcell’s visit to Callinan). The Taoiseach indeed confirmed that Purcell had been dispatched:
I thought it appropriate, given the nature of the information made available to me, that the Commissioner should be made aware of its gravity and how I felt about it and the implications.
Micheál Martin suggested an alternative narrative.
He essentially sacked him. That is what that means.
The Taoiseach responded:
This is the first time Deputy Martin has accused me of being a liar in here and of using some perception of authority to remove people from office. I deplore what he is suggesting absolutely.
But the suggestion stuck — and the Taoiseach’s failure to offer more explicit wording meant the lunchtime news bulletins had their lede.
Later on Wednesday afternoon, the Green Party (remember them?) tweeted a link to a public tender issued by the Gardaí in 2007.
I had a root through the tender and determined that there had been recording systems installed in 21 locations, including at Garda HQ, six divisional headquarters, and 15 other prominent stations around the country. The system sought by the Gardaí — and paid for with €537,173.45 of public money — would include a 2-terabyte hard drive in each of the seven former venues, and a multimedia PC for recording and playback in each of the other 15, as well as an electronic backup system for the existing physical tapes. Significantly, the system was to be designed such that anyone with appropriate credentials could log in remotely over the Garda network and listen back to conversations recorded locally. Any high-ranking Garda would be able to sit at a desk in the Phoenix Park and, in theory, listen back to any phone call in any significant provincial station.
The tender had been signed off on by the Garda director of finance, Michael Culhane, and been the subject of a public tender in late 2007. How the whole taping system could have remained a mystery for so long was just that: a mystery.
That afternoon, Shatter returned to the Dáil to discuss the Garda Inspectorate report and issues on the penalty points system. While also insisting that many of their allegations had been unproven (particularly the claim that seven people had died on the roads at the hands of drivers who had penalty points expunged), Shatter acknowledged that he was wrong to claim that McCabe and Wilson had not co-operated with an inquiry for which their assistance was never sought. He was sorry for the offence and upset caused.
The five-hour discussion ended with an ad hoc Q&A session, which inevitably included questions on the tapes as well as on penalty points. Socialist TD Joe Higgins asked the Minister if he had held any discussions with Martin Callinan between March 10 (the date of Callinan’s letter) and March 15 (the day Shatter left for Mexico and became seemingly unreachable). Surely Callinan might have raised the subject, even in passing: ‘By the way, did Brian Purcell tell you about that letter?’
Shatter responded:
I will truthfully say that I do not recall whether or not I had phone conversations with the Garda Commissioner between 10 and 15 March, when I would have gone to Mexico. I certainly did not talk to him from Mexico. I genuinely cannot recall whether I did. Certainly, there are occasions when we would talk about issues. I have no recollection of having a conversation with him about any issue that week but I cannot say that for definite, 100%, because I do not make a note every time some brief matter arises about which we would have conversed. I do not recall talking to him that week but I cannot say that for certain.
I cannot say for certain that this issue was never the subject of a conversation between the Garda Commissioner and myself.
Addendum — March 31: A spokesperson for Shatter has since contacted the Irish Times and said Shatter is misquoted on the Dáil record — and that, in fact, the last line should read: “I can say for certain”. The original audio is supplied to the left hand side to allow readers hear the original comments for themselves.
On Thursday a few other ministers were asked about their position on the whole affair. Most — particularly those in Labour — were happy to back Shatter, given he had now withdrawn the remarks about McCabe and Wilson, and that he had committed to an independent policing authority.
Pat Rabbitte affirmed that other ministers in Cabinet had no knowledge of the taping affair until it was brought to them on Tuesday. He also rejected claims that Callinan had been sacked — saying simply that Brian Purcell had been sent over to express the “disquiet at Cabinet level” over the news that taping had been carried out to such an extensive degree.
On Friday, Fianna Fáil announced a motion of no confidence in Alan Shatter, to be debated on April 1 and 2:
Such motions tend to have the effect of forcing governments to ‘circle the wagons’. The Dáil arithmetic means the motion is destined for failure — and as was the case when James Reilly faced a similar hurdle in September 2012, it helps to draw a line under a scandal.
However, there are still clouds on the horizon. The Data Protection Commissioner will rule next month on whether Shatter broke data protection law by revealing Mick Wallace’s mobile phone usage during a live debate on RTÉ’s Prime Time.
There are also separate external inquiries into the penalty points system (by GSOC), the allegations that GSOC was being bugged (by retired judge John Cooke), and that Shatter and the Gardaí failed to adequately act on a dossier alleging a litany of other failings (by senior Seán Guerin).
It is curious that Fine Gael and Labour might affirm confidence in Alan Shatter in the Dáil on Wednesday night and effectively secure his tenure, given how many other damning verdicts may yet be in the pipeline.
Given the outstanding questions over the Garda taping affair, it is curious that Labour are prepared to back him simply because he withdrew an unfair remark, five months after it was originally uttered. It seems Labour is satisfied to let sleeping dogs lie, simply because it has now won approval for an independent policing authority, and because Shatter is a legislative powerhouse in paving the way for next year’s referendum on same-sex marriage.
At this juncture there are still many questions left to answer — the following among them:
Was Alan Shatter among the people who spoke to Martin Callinan, and whose feedback led him not to withdraw his ‘disgusting’ remark?
Did Alan Shatter speak to Martin Callinan between March 10 and 24 — and if he did, did Callinan inquire about whether the taping issue had been brought to his attention?
Did Alan Shatter learn of the taping before he attended the meeting with Kenny, Whelan, Fraser and Purcell on Monday night? If he did, who told him? Was it Brian Purcell — who, it seems, did not see fit to pass on Callinan’s letter from a fortnight earlier?
Is there truly nobody in the Department of Justice who is tasked with reading the reports published by the Garda Ombudsman Commission?
Is there truly nobody in the Department who was aware of the Garda tender, and raise the prospect that the technology could have illegal applications?
Why did Enda Kenny opt to appoint a senior counsel to investigate the veracity of the Attorney General’s concerns? Why was Alan Shatter seemingly kept out of this loop until this senior counsel had reported back? Who was this senior counsel? Who chose them? And how, exactly, did they investigate?
Was there genuinely “disquiet at Cabinet level” (in Pat Rabbitte’s words) for Brian Purcell to relay to Callinan in their meeting at Callinan’s home? Given that Cabinet had not formally discussed the issue by that point — and that only three members (including two ministers) were aware of the tapes at the time, was “Cabinet level” a fair summary? Or was it simply an inelegant choice of words on Rabbitte’s part?
What we do know is that things are falling apart, and that many spokes have been torn from Alan Shatter’s wheel of justice. Martin Callinan, a close confidant, is gone. Oliver Connolly, the Confidential Recipient and former political donor, is gone. Brian Purcell’s position appears precarious at best.
What we do not know — and what we are all waiting to see — is whether, in Yeats’ words, the centre can still hold.