Callinan told me Sgt McCabe was ‘not to be trusted’
Top official tells Tribunal of the Garda chief’s warning
THE Comptroller and Auditor General has said former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan told him that whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe was ‘not to be trusted’ and had been accused of ‘sexual offences’. Seamus McCarthy, whose job is to ensure State funds are managed correctly, was the latest in a series of witnesses to tell the Disclosures Tribunal that Mr Callinan had warned them about the whistleblower’s character. Mr McCarthy, who compiled a report detailing abuse of the penalty-point system, said Mr Callinan’s comments were made to him just before a Public Accounts Committee meeting in January 2014, at which the commissioner was due to give evidence about the points scandal. He said that as he arrived at the bottom of the stairs in the Leinster House complex, just before the PAC meeting, a group of garda representatives were there. These
‘Comments were inappropriate’
included Martin Callinan, as well as the then deputy commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan and press officer Superintendent David Taylor. ‘My recollection is the commissioner coming forward to have a word with me. My recollection is that we were apart from the big group, so my colleagues were not party to the conversation and the colleagues of Commissioner Callinan were not party to the conversation,’ said Mr McCarthy. ‘We began with a greeting, but very quickly the commissioner raised Sgt McCabe’s name in the conversation, along the lines that Sgt McCabe was not to be trusted, that he had questions to answer and that there were sexual offence allegations before him. ‘I was surprised, certainly. My immediate concern was Sgt McCabe’s name being raised in conversation because as far as I was concerned, that was not a name that we had shared with An Garda Síochána at any stage during the examination, and I had already on occasions in Public Accounts resisted revealing who the whistleblower was.’ Asked how he reacted, he said: ‘My immediate response was that I hadn’t relied at all on the whistleblower’s information, there was no aspect of the report that depended on the character of any whistleblower. But I did not confirm that Sgt McCabe was the whistleblower in question.’ He confirmed that sexual offences had been referred to in the plural, and that they appeared to be current allegations. He said he then moved the conversation on to what was in the report, stating again that his office had used their own samples of fixed-charge penalty notices to reveal which ones had been wrongly quashed. Counsel for the commissioner, Mr Conor Dignam, said Mr Callinan insisted his client did not say that Sgt McCabe was not to be trusted, or that he had questions to answer. ‘He will say he did use the word “question” in the context that some of the allegations made by Sgt McCabe were questionable, because some of the allegations were found not to be correct. ‘He will also say that what he was trying to convey was that care should be taken in the assessment of the allegations made of Sgt McCabe.’ Mr Dignam added: ‘I have to put it to you that Mr Callinan’s account of the conversation is more likely a correct memory. ‘If Mr Callinan had been whispering in your ear in order to do down Sgt McCabe in your eyes, you would have known that that was improper. It would have caused you unease and concern. You would have noted it and certainly taken some action on it,’ he suggested. Mr McCarthy replied: ‘I certainly thought about it after. I suppose it did occur to me that there was something I didn’t know, perhaps, that the commissioner did.’ He said he appreciated that Mr Callinan’s comments were, as tribunal counsel said, ‘entirely inappropriate’, and he also described them as ‘highly unusual’. He said he thought the comments must relate to a media story he had read about a computer, containing evidence about a paedophile, going missing from a Garda station. He said he had heard no rumours connecting Sgt McCabe to sexual assault before. But he said the senior garda’s comments were ‘completely moot’ and did not change his conviction about his report, which he had already presented, and which he stood over. He had told the tribunal that his office received a file of 4,000 cancelled penalty-point notices from Sgt McCabe in August 2012. A second similar file was given to them by Noel Brett of the Road Safety Authority in October.