Judge criticises witness Taylor for retracting key allegations
THE chairman of the Charleton Tribunal yesterday hit out at former Garda press officer Dave Taylor for withdrawing almost all of his claims against exGarda commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan.
‘The entire people of Ireland’ had heard these allegations and they had been made under oath in the High Court, Judge Charleton said.
‘The commissioner had to leave office in relation to these events,’ he told Mr Taylor’s barrister Michael O’Higgins.
‘So it’s fine to make allegations against people in public, to public representatives, but that’s it?’
The chairman’s intervention came as Mr O’Higgins’ finished questioning Ms O’Sullivan.
Mr O’Higgins confirmed that all the allegations about Ms O’Sullivan being kept informed by text message of a strategy to discredit whistleblower Maurice McCabe were being withdrawn.
He said Supt Taylor now accepted that a criminal investigation of him into the leaking of information to the media was valid. He added his client was no longer making the case that the former commissioner’s husband, a senior officer in the force, was added to the Taylor investigation team for the purposes of securing a charge.
Judge Charleton asked if that claim was being dropped ‘just like that’.
Mr O’Higgins replied: ‘In evidence, he accepted that the... investigation was valid. That may have repercussions elsewhere.
‘I understood his testimony to be that he was resiling from it [his claims regarding the investigation]’.
The judge replied: ‘That is not very satisfactory.’
Mr O’Higgins said: ‘What he alleges is that Commissioner Callinan gave him a direction to brief negatively, and it is his belief that because you [Ms O’Sullivan] were his deputy commissioner you were aware of this.’
He said that while she was deputy commissioner, Ms O’Sullivan’s office acted as a ‘funnel’ to Mr Callinan’s.
Ms O’Sullivan insisted this was not true.
She also said it was untrue that Supt Taylor had updated her on the negative briefings.
She told the tribunal: ‘I was never privy to or aware of any smear campaign as alleged by Supt Taylor.’
Judge Peter Charleton said it was clear from Supt Taylor’s evidence that he had a problem with Ms O’Sullivan.
She had earlier told the tribunal that she did not trust the then Garda press officer and she said he was one of a group of people in the force who were not happy having a woman at the helm.
The tribunal heard that she transferred him out of the press office and into the traffic corps when she became commissioner.
Asked why she had transferred Supt Taylor, Ms O’Sullivan began to tell the tribunal she felt his ‘skills were more suitable for tactical deployment in the traffic division’.
Judge Charleton intervened: ‘It doesn’t help me if you lapse into PR-speak. I didn’t learn anything from your answer...I really want to know why you moved him.
‘It’s a mystery to me why anybody put him in the job in the first place.’
She replied: ‘The issue was, I did not trust Supt Taylor and I did not feel comfortable in his company.’
Ms O’Sullivan denied she was trying to avoid a confrontation with him, adding: ‘I always anticipated some pushback, I probably just didn’t anticipate how much.’
‘I anticipated some pushback’