It’s the story that just won’t go away. Certainly not in the Dáil anyway. Penalty points and the Minister for Justice – yet another episode.
It’s enough to make you breathless. Especially when this time it was the Minister’s own encounter with the boys in blue, which rather came out of the, eh, blue.
There had been a very sombre start to proceedings when Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin expressed the shock of all at the terrorist attack on a British soldier in London and sympathies with his family and British population.
He then went on to the disturbing reports of mistreatment of children at three creches in Dublin and Wicklow, which he said would cause widespread alarm.
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore joined in the condemnation of the killing of the soldier.
Responding to the creche allegations he said it “taps into every parent’s worst nightmare” and stressed that the mistreatment or abuse of children was unacceptable in any setting.
Sinn Féin’s Jonathon O’Brien highlighted the less than acceptable psychiatric care being provided for vulnerable young people, being denied admission to specialist facilities while beds remained unoccupied because of staff shortages. The Tánaiste highlighted Government action on mental health.
Independent TD Mattie McGrath stood up. There was complete silence in the chamber as he too offered the sympathies of the technical group and their revulsion at the London attack.
Silence held as he asked if the Tánaiste or Taoiseach was aware that the Minister for Justice, just before he became Minister, had been stopped by gardaí in 2011 and whether he was the beneficiary of Garda discretion.
He asked if the Tánaiste was further aware if he attempted to use that ‘travelling to the Dáil’ privilege to avoid a breath test, and if his behaviour was “appropriate and cordial”.
Heads swivelled from one side of the chamber to the other to hear the Tánaiste’s reply. “How would I know that” he said and how the Government benches guffawed.
But that stopped as soon as the Tipperary TD said he wasn’t raising it as a joke.
Cue sombre faces all round and they remained fairly serious until a real spat began.
Micheál Martin, world renowned smoking ban imposer, was deeply disturbed to learn of a meeting between the heavy-hitting troika of the Taoiseach, Minister for Finance and Minister for Justice and smoking industry representatives.
As well as banning smoking he had banned meetings with the industry and couldn’t believe the captains of government were consorting with them. And where was the registration of lobbyists legislation?
What a history of behind-the-scenes lobbying by Fianna Fáil governments said the Tánaiste.
Look to your own, retorted Martin. Some former Labour officials were “the greatest inside-trackers with the tobacco industry for a long time”.
This was never going to end well. “The shelves of the offices of every member of this House are creaking with the weight of reports from tribunals about the back-door lobbying that was engaged in by Fianna Fáil ministers down the years,” trumpeted the Tánaiste. Who funnily enough never explained how the meeting with the cigarette industry went.
