MINISTER FOR Finance Michael Noonan has confirmed he agreed to meet Independent TD Michael Lowry some months after he was censured by the Dáil following damning findings by the Moriarty tribunal.
Mr Noonan said last night that Mr Lowry led a delegation of the youth organisation Foróige to the Minister’s Dáil office last October and also took part in the meeting. “The meeting between Foróige and the Minister was arranged through Deputy Lowry’s office, and Deputy Lowry was present at the meeting,” Mr Noonan said in a statement.
Mr Noonan has become the second senior Minister to say he has held meetings with Mr Lowry since adverse findings were made against him in the Moriarty tribunal’s final report in March last year.
Mr Noonan said yesterday if at all possible he accommodated “requests from Deputies and Senators of all parties for meetings”.
It was disclosed yesterday that Mr Lowry arranged for a plastics company to meet Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan in March last year, six days after the tribunal’s final report had found Mr Lowry had played a “pervasive and insidious” role in the process to award a second mobile phone licence. The tribunal also found Mr Lowry received payments of £447,000 sterling from Denis O’Brien, whose company was awarded the licence.
Within 48 hours of the meeting taking place, Mr Hogan told the Dáil that he would have “no truck” with anybody the tribunal concluded had acted improperly.
A spokesman for Minister for Health James Reilly said Mr Lowry was one of three North Tipperary TDs who collectively met him about a nursing home in the constituency last November.
When contacted yesterday, spokespeople for all other Ministers, including Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore said no such meetings had been arranged in their departments.
However, Mr Lowry said yesterday he had met several Ministers in the current Government. “I have brought individual and national issues to the attention of various Minister,” he said, adding he would continue to do so.
The Taoiseach and Mr Lowry separately defended the meeting last March. The department said the meeting had been with a plastics company from Tipperary concerned about protecting its workforce. On that basis, Mr Hogan saw no reason not to proceed.
But Minister for Arts Jimmy Deenihan, a Fine Gael colleague of Mr Hogan’s, said yesterday it would have been better if the meeting had not happened. Mr Hogan himself needed to clarify the matter, he said.
Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton said: “The Government does have to be conscious of how people against whom adverse findings have been made interact with members of the Government.”
But in a potential rift between both parties, Fine Gael TD Charlie Flanagan criticised Ms Burton on his Twitter account.
