You answered none of my questions, says judge

‘The walls were closing around you’ ‘Was there a sense of grievance?’

THERE were yet more tense exchanges at the Disclosures Tribunal yesterday when the chairman declared that ex-Garda press officer Superintendent David Taylor had failed to answer any of his questions.

It was Supt Taylor’s third day in the witness box at Dublin Castle and he was being cross examined by counsel for former Garda chiefs Martin Callinan and Nóirín O’Sullivan.

Judge Peter Charleton stated: ‘You didn’t answer any of my questions, Superintendent... quite literally, none of them.’

Micheál O’Higgins SC said Supt Taylor had suffered a ‘sudden and dramatic’ fall from grace, after the resignation of Mr Callinan in March 2014.

He was transferred to the traffic department and was later arrested and subjected to a disciplinary inquiry, before being suspended from duty on reduced pay.

However, Supt Taylor – whose protected disclosure about an alleged smear campaign against Garda whsitle-blower Sergeant Maurice McCabe was a major trigger for the tribunal – denied that he was bitter, or that he had been anxious to ‘bring down’ Mr Callinan’s successor, Nóirín O’Sullivan.

The tribunal heard that Supt Taylor had a number of phones seized following an article which appeared online in October 2013, concerning the removal of Roma children from their parents in Tallaght. He was subsequently arrested and questioned in May 2015 in relation to leaking unauthorised information to the media. He told the tribunal that he had nothing to do with the story.

He agreed that in February 2016, he began High Court proceedings calling for a judicial review to stop the criminal and disciplinary proceedings.

In papers grounding that judicial review, Supt Taylor complained that a phone seized by the gardaí apparently made contact with a neighbour of Supt Taylor’s, using the Viber platform.

Judge Charleton asked if Supt Taylor was alleging that someone in the gardaí had been attempting to interfere with his phones.

Supt Taylor did not answer the question directly, he merely said he had been concerned by the Viber activity. Judge Charleton said: ‘You didn’t answer any of my questions, superintendent... quite literally, none of them.’

Supt Taylor replied: ‘Well, I’m only trying to give the rationale why I raised the concern.’

In his judicial review papers, he stated that the arrest had been made ‘exclusively for the purpose of exerting further and additional pressure’. Judge Charleton noted that leave was never granted by the High Court for the judicial review to proceed. The DPP ultimately decided not to prosecute Supt Taylor. But the criminal investigation was still pending in September 2016 when he had met Sgt McCabe, said Mr O’Higgins.

‘Did you feel a burning sense of grievance?’ counsel asked.

Supt Taylor replied: ‘I felt for my wife and my family as a result of my wage being cut, which made it very difficult for us.’

Supt Taylor said that when he confessed to Sgt McCabe his own role in negatively briefing the media, it was a ‘highly emotional couple of hours’.

He said he had been contacted by Sgt McCabe ‘out of the blue’ in the spring of 2016, and they later met. But Mr O’Higgins said that his protected disclosure, shortly after that meeting, ‘led to a political campaign to bring down Nóirín O’Sullivan’.

He asked the witness, in the light of his transfer and disciplinary proceedings: ‘Were you anxious to bring her down?’

‘Absolutely not. I was a suspended Garda superintendent. I did not have the ability to do such a thing,’ Supt Taylor said.

He agreed that he had met Deputies Mick Wallace and Clare Daly shortly after speaking to Sgt McCabe, but said he did not know they would raise the smear campaign in the Dáil. Mr Wallace said in a statement to the tribunal that Supt Taylor had complained that the gardaí ‘were out to shaft him now, in a manner he regarded as not dissimilar to what they had done to Maurice’. Supt Taylor said he would never compare himself to Sgt McCabe. Mr O’Higgins suggested Supt Taylor had also made ‘wild, unrestrained and quite extreme’ comments about Ms O’Sullivan to Mr Wallace, including that she had bleached phones to destroy them.

Counsel said: ‘The walls were closing in around you... You came up with this retrospective allegation to cover the period 2013 to 2014, when you were press officer and Mr Callinan was commissioner, because no-one would have believed an allegation purely against Ms O’Sullivan.’

‘I don’t accept the point you are making,’ the witness said.