‘I was told the force was going after McCabe’
HR chief said he replied: ‘You must be joking’, when allegedly told of whistleblower policy
THE head of Garda Human Resources has claimed he was told the force was ‘going after’ Sgt Maurice McCabe at the O’Higgins Commission, the Disclosures Tribunal heard yesterday.
John Barrett, said the ‘shocking’ comment from Chief Administrative Officer Cyril Dunne came ‘out of the blue’.
Mr Barrett said he had not had anything to do with the preparation work for the O’Higgins Commission, and that he had been at a meeting on a separate matter on May 13, 2015, when the comment was made – the day before the commission began hearings.
He said in a statement: ‘Mr Dunne asked me to remain in his office after the other attendees had left, and, with reference to Sgt Maurice McCabe, said: “We are going after him at the Commission”.’
Mr Barrett added: ‘If I had to do it all again I would have made a detailed contemporaneous note. It seemed odd, compared to the work that had gone on before – I didn’t understand it until some time later.’
He said he found the comment ‘shocking’ at a time when he had been trying to improve Sgt McCabe’s working conditions in Mullingar, something then Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald had been recently checking up on.
‘It was at the tail-end of a meeting in Mr Dunne’s office. He said it to me as I was leaving. I turned to him and said, “You must be joking”. I may have introduced an expletive in the middle of that. I apologise for that,’ he said.
Mr Barrett said that if he had fully understood the comment, he would have protested more strongly. He said it prompted him to go and look up the terms of reference for the Tribunal.
Tribunal counsel Diarmaid McGuinness said Mr Dunne, who is due to give evidence at a later date, said he was certain he never made the comment. He said Mr Dunne said he was not involved with the Commission, and had no
‘I may have used an expletive’
basis for saying anything like that. But Mr Barrett said he was sure the words were said, because he remembered his ‘visceral reaction to it’. He said he took the ‘naive view’ that the judge at the commission would address all the issues raised before it.
Mr Barrett said he had not initially been able to recall the date on which the comment was made, but he pieced it together from emails and diary entries which focused on the date of the meeting. He said he would make his diary available to the Tribunal.
Meanwhile, Ms Fitzgerald held two meetings with Garda Commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan as a ‘media frenzy’ erupted in the wake of the O’Higgins report, the Tribunal heard.
The former tánaiste did not mention the meetings in her statement to the Tribunal following her resignation last year, but said she had used them to ask the commissioner to explain her approach to Sgt Maurice McCabe.
The meetings took place on May 16 and May 19, 2016, shortly after the publication of the report, when leaks of the Commission were raising public queries over confidence in Ms O’Sullivan.
Ms Fitzgerald said she had quizzed the commissioner about whether her public support for whistleblowers was undermined by an alleged attack on Sgt McCabe’s integrity at the Commission, which was looking into his complaints of corruption and malpractice in the force.
Ms Fitzgerald told the tribunal: ‘At the meeting of the 19th I wanted to understand what her approach had been. She assured me. And I did put the direct question to her: Was one thing being said in public and another thing being said in private? Because that’s clearly what people were saying. And what she said to me was, she made it clear she had not questioned Sgt McCabe’s integrity and had never accused him of malice, and she wanted to treat all witnesses equally.
‘We had a strong discussion; I would say a very clear exchange.’
She added: ‘What she said to me at that point was she wanted the truth to emerge at the Commission, and to co-operate fully with the Commission.’
Mr McGuinness SC put it to her: ‘You were calling her to account for how she had approached Sgt McCabe?’ She replied: ‘I was getting as clear an explanation as I could.’ She said she wanted to put as many facts as she could onto the record, while facing what counsel called a ‘media frenzy’.
She said partial leaks of the transcripts from the Commission had emerged just two days after the report was published in April 2016. She felt it was hard to make decisions about them.