I was wrongly forced to quit

Alan Shatter has suggested he was wrongly forced to resign from Government because of the findings of the Guerin report which he lambasted as "fundamentally flawed" and akin to a "kangaroo court".

The former justice minister said Taoiseach Enda Kenny was not aware of the full story when he derived information from the “mistaken conclusion that I had failed in some respects in my statutory obligation”.

He said the Dáil must revisit the report into allegations of Garda malpractice before the terms of reference are drawn up for a full statutory inquiry.

The Dublin South TD announced his resignation on May 7, the day after Mr Kenny received the report from barrister Sean Guerin, which, in the words of Mr Kenny, “vindicated” garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe.

At the time, Mr Kenny described the report as “factual and straight and, I must say, hard-hitting”, and “points to the inadequacy of investigation and analysis in dealing with the detail of evidence submitted by Sergeant McCabe”.

Mr Shatter yesterday said the result of the report “was to render my continuing as minister untenable and, as a consequence, I resigned my position”.

The “startling omission” from the report was that “a different view of the facts could emerge” if Mr Shatter had been interviewed. He asked why Sgt McCabe was interviewed for 19 hours while he, as justice minister, was not.

Using the legal privilege protection of the Dáil, Mr Shatter said that Mr Guerin, “as a prosecuting counsel, must know that the manner in which he conducted his role and some of the conclusions reached by him would not withstand court scrutiny”.

Although Mr Shatter appointed him to carry out the review, he said he never expected Mr Guerin to “ignore basic principles of constitutional and natural justice and fair procedures”, and that he had put “in peril a value system crucial to the well-being of all our citizens”.

He said: “To ignore them is to endorse the creation of kangaroo courts as dramatically depicted in Kafka’s book The Trial.”

Mr Shatter said everyone should be entitled to know that they cannot “be secretly put on trial, have charges levied against us of which we have no knowledge, be prosecuted without being informed of the evidence, and convicted without being given the opportunity to speak or defend ourselves”.

Mr Shatter also criticised Department of Justice secretary general Brian Purcell, who he said did not pass on a letter sent to him from the attorney general’s office last December advising him to pass two booklets of complaints from Sgt McCabe to the Garda commissioner.

“The first I learnt of this letter was upon my reading of the Guerin report,” said Mr Shatter, adding that he “doubted” the attorney general was aware of the full contents of the letter, nor was the Taoiseach when they discussed the report.