She ‘could have acted’

FRANCES Fitzgerald insists she could not have acted on the email as it advised her she should not interfere, but Fianna Fáil’s justice spokesman believes otherwise.

Jim O’Callaghan told RTÉ’s Saturday With Claire Byrne: ‘Frances Fitzgerald should have assembled the people who sent the email, made a phone call to the Commissioner, and [said to her] why are you referring to this criminal charge in circumstances when we both know that charge has been dismissed by the DPP?’ He said the Guerin report had already said Maurice McCabe ‘is a person of integrity’.

‘If I had been Justice Minister and the Commissioner had not heeded my advice I would have sent my own legal team… into the Commission to state to Mr Justice O’Higgins, I disassociate myself as minister from the strategy of the Garda Commissioner.’

Journalist Mick Clifford, a confidante of Mr McCabe, told the show the Tánaiste was ‘guilty of failure, total incuriosity, of what was happening to somebody she had praised.

‘To be fair, the email has all the hallmarks of an ass-covering exercise, that it was sent to her in order so somebody could say the minister was informed. It is not clear the exact nature of the attack that was going to be perpetrated, I think there’s no question about it, she did nothing, there were a number of things she could have done, Jim O’Callaghan pointed out most of them.’ He also said that the email originated in the AG’s office but the AG is the legal adviser to the Cabinet not the department, so who else did the AG’s office inform about the email.