CONFIDENCE VOTE:GOVERNMENT CHIEF Whip Pat Carey has said he was not aware of any Green objection on Wednesday to tabling a motion of confidence in now former minister for defence Willie O'Dea.
Mr Carey said his office notified other party whips of the change to the Dáil order paper, as would be normal, after Taoiseach Brian Cowen decided to respond to the motion of no confidence in Mr O’Dea put down by Fine Gael.
“Normally the Government whip says, ‘This is what we are proposing to do’. The other whips, the Opposition whips particularly, mightn’t always love it, but they generally tend to agree with the approach,” he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland. Asked whether he was aware of an objection from the Greens at the time or subsequently, he said: “I’m not aware that there was an objection.”
Green Party leader John Gormley said yesterday he informed Mr Cowen at a meeting on Thursday that Mr O’Dea’s position was no longer tenable.
Mr Gormley said: “I outlined our concerns in detail and I indicated to the Taoiseach that in my view, Minister O’Dea’s position was untenable, and the stability of the Government would be under threat as a consequence, and it would prove a real distraction.”
He denied that he was embarrassed by the party’s decision to support a motion of confidence in Mr O’Dea. “A number of issues had changed for us, the article we were promised from the Limerick Leader. This was an article that was going to lay out all of the facts, it would corroborate his version of events and it would also vindicate his position – but it didn’t do that.”
Mr Gormley added “there were further difficulties in the way the minister presented his case to the Dáil, the tape was played on RTÉ the next day, and it did seem to indicate there was a real intent to smear – and it was a question of looking at all of the facts in a comprehensive way”.
Mr Gormley distanced himself from his party colleague Dan Boyle’s claim that the Green Party were “bounced” by Fianna Fáil into a vote of confidence, but he said that circumstances in which the vote was called were “less than ideal”. He said Mr Carey had not contacted Green Party whip Ciarán Cuffe about the vote of confidence in Mr O’Dea, but he stressed that he was making no complaint or issue about that.
Mr Boyle said yesterday he regretted the confidence debate had not taken place later, but his colleagues had “behaved in the way that they had to” at that time.