Fennelly Fallout: Taoiseach ‘wanted rid of Shatter and Callinan’

The extent to which former justice minister Alan Shatter was excluded from top-level talks on the phone recording controversy was due to his perceived closeness to the former Garda commissioner, according to independent TDs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace.

The Fennelly Report highlights how Mr Shatter appeared to be excluded from the Taoiseach’s key dealings regarding the revelation of the longtime practice of recording phonecalls in garda stations, while it also illustrates how the former secretary general in his own department, Brian Purcell, failed to inform the then-minister how he had been told two weeks before by then-commissioner Martin Callinan about the recordings.