Slapping down for Minister Callely over car offer

EMBATTLED Minister Ivor Callely was given a public slapping down yesterday by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

Mr Ahern said it had not been "advisable" for Mr Callely to offer a parliamentary assistant a car as an inducement to stop him resigning. Barely concealing his irritation at the spate of controversies swirling around the transport minister, Mr Ahern said he had given Mr Callely some "useful and meaningful" advice about how to conduct himself in future.

Mr Callely has been embroiled in a series of disputes with senior members of his staff culminating in the car offer.

Government sources have indicated that Mr Callely is now on his final warning and will not survive further bad publicity.

Mr Callely was yesterday summoned to receive a dressing down at the Taoiseach's constituency office in north Dublin.

"I have had a long conversation with Ivor Callely and obviously I want Ivor to get on with his job."

And in a thinly-veiled rebuke, Mr Ahern said he had spoken to "impatient" Mr Callely about how to deal with staff members better.

"I have also told him that it is Government practice that we work closely with our public servants and our civil servants.

"I hope he can work closely with his. It's important that we acknowledge the work of our staff, and even though I can understand people being impatient to get work done we have to do that in a harmonious way," Mr Ahern said.

The Taoiseach said he did not think it was "advisable" for Mr Callely to have offered his parliamentary assistant a car as an "inducement" to stop him resigning.

"If that employee was a public servant it would be totally improper and it's not something that I would get into either.

"I think in the circumstances what Ivor was doing is this was a valued employee of his from the constituency side he was very anxious to try and find some mechanism of keeping the individual with him.

"And he was exploring ways that perhaps he could try to do that.

"I never think these things are advisable.

"He couldn't arrange to get him any increase in his salary or any of his allowances because they were all through the department, so he was seeing if there was something else to try to attract him to stay.

"He assures me that if that had been something that had been explored further it would have been something that would have been fully declared and fully documented," the Taoiseach said.

Mr Callely has also come under fire for the appearance of his picture in adverts for Dublin Christmas traffic management scheme Operation Freeflow. His secretary, a civil servant, also sought a transfer after Mr Callely told her to attend a function.