Rival stories of ‘headers’ and horses at tribunal

JOHN McGuinness said he expected to talk to the Garda commissioner inside the hotel.

But just as he was gathering himself to exit his own car, he could see Garda commissioner Martin Callinan determinedly making his way towards the passenger seat beside him.

The chairman of the parliamentary public spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), was about to meet the country’s senior policeman for one of the nation’s more publicised “private conversations”.

Was this correct procedure, the PAC chairman was asked? Well, the answer was simple: If you get a call to a meeting from the nation’s most senior policeman, what options do you have? The encounter happened outside Bewley’s Hotel, at Newlands Cross on the southern edge of Dublin, on January 24, 2014.

The previous day, Commissioner Callinan had appeared before the PAC, and notoriously described the Garda whistleblowers’ behaviour as “disgusting”. Now his mission was to persuade John McGuinness it was not appropriate to have allegations of Garda wrongdoing heard at Leinster House.

But according to John McGuinness’s version – hotly contested by Martin Callinan

– the nation’s top garda also needed to mark the TD’s card about the nation’s most notorious Garda whistleblower, Sergeant Maurice McCabe.

“He suggested that he had sexually abused family, and an individual. That he was not to be trusted. That I had made a grave error in relation to the PAC and the public hearings because of this. I would find myself in serious trouble,” Deputy McGuinness recalled of the commissioner’s car conversation about Sgt McCabe and the potential fallout.

For John McGuinness, it was a follow-on from a disturbing but brief conversation between himself and Martin Callinan the previous day at Leinster House, at the close of lengthy evidence the commissioner had given the PAC.

John McGuinness had just come to politely say good luck to the witnesses as was the custom.

But the TD recalled the commissioner’s scathing assessment of another Garda whistleblower, John Wilson, and even more serious allegations against Sgt McCabe.

The commissioner said Gda Wilson had been called to an incident on Grafton Street involving Travellers and an ill-treated horse. “He pulled the ‘knacker’ off the horse” – because it involved a horse and individuals. He got on the horse himself, rode it back to the barracks, and tied it to the railings of the barracks, Mr McGuinness recalled the Commissioner as telling him.

Mr McGuinness said Commissioner Callinan continued: “And the other fella fiddles with kids. They’re the kinds of f***ing headbangers I’m dealing with.”

Mr McGuinness apologised for relaying such language to the tribunal. But the phrases were repeated in the course of the day, with similar due apologies from lawyers cross-examining on behalf of various senior gardaí.

From tribunal documentation, it transpired Commissioner Callinan recalled asking Deputy McGuinness if he would be calling Gda John Wilson as a witness. “You must be joking, sure he’s a f***ing header,” the commissioner recorded Mr McGuinness’s reply.

John McGuinness rejected this assertion: “Untrue, I have the greatest respect for John Wilson.”

There was a similar moment later. Lawyer for former Gda Wilson, Mark Harty, said the story about the horse on Grafton Street dated back to 1983 and was only recalled recently, 35 years later.

The story of the ‘Grafton Street horse’ was dated right back to 1983