Whistleblower’s claims add to list of issues facing Shatter

Alan Shatter has had the good fortune to be Minister for Justice at a time of sustained falls in reported crime.

Prison overcrowding has peaked and eased and the often difficult asylum process has slowed to a trickle.

High-profile gangland feuding has dissipated while contentious protests against Shell in Co Mayo and the American military using Shannon Airport have almost completely disappeared.

Garda and Defence Forces recruitment have been among the first hiring programmes reactivated as the State emerges from recession. Yet Shatter's image has not benefited from those developments and instead has suffered from his involvement in a number of controversies.

Engulfed since the weekend before last in the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission bugging controversy, he yesterday lost a key man overboard in the shape of Oliver Connolly.

A lawyer by profession, Connolly was in 2011 appointed to the office of confidential recipient.

The post was established in the aftermath of the Morris tribunal and was intended as a place where Garda members could go to report wrongdoing or corruption in the force for investigation.

It was to that office that Garda Sgt Maurice McCabe went in 2012 to blow the whistle about what he believed was corruption across the force in the shape of the termination of penalty points for thousands of motorists.

A recording and transcript of one conversation in February 2012 between McCabe and Connolly has emerged. In it, Connolly appears to warn McCabe that his raising of the alleged corruption would not be well received by Shatter.

Shatter had already said in recent weeks that the office of confidential recipient was not working. However, with Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin like a dog with a bone in recent weeks on the matter of Connolly's remarks to McCabe, it emerged yesterday that Shatter had relieved Connolly of his post.

McCabe has not restricted himself to raising the penalty points issue with the Fianna Fáil leader.

He has also made allegations to Martin about the background to the murder in 2007 in a Limerick hotel of Sylvia Roche Kelly (33).

Jerry McGrath (28), of Dundrum, Co Tipperary, was found guilty of her murder in March 2008.

He was on bail on two separate charges of false imprisonment and assault causing harm when he carried out that murder.

He committed an assault in Co Cavan in mid-2007 and was granted bail. However, in October of that year he tried to kidnap a five-year-old child from her Co Tipperary home.

He was caught and charged with false imprisonment but was granted bail again after the court was not told he was already on bail for the Co Cavan assault.

Five weeks after being bailed again he killed Ms Roche Kelly. McCabe has alleged a Garda cover-up in the affair.

The penalty points debacle is now with the GSOC after the controversy around it built to such a degree that Shatter was forced to refer it to the Garda watchdog to defuse the mess.

The sacking yesterday of a friend of the Minister who appointed him will breathe renewed life into the penalty points campaign, which will enrage gardaí.

With Connolly having been dismissed, the three-person commission that heads the GSOC must have viewed his exit with some trepidation.

Shatter said yesterday that the commission had relevant information as early as last December linking the wifi anomaly flagged by the Verrimus security company to innocuous and random connecting with a wifi system in a coffee shop downstairs from the GSOC offices.

That this was not brought to Shatter's attention until the very end of a working week when the GSOC commented at length on TV, in written statements to the media and before an Oireachtas committee seems incredible.

This revelation, coupled with him being forced by embarrassing revelations to relieve Connolly of his post, further adds to the impression Shatter has lost control.

By all accounts Labour has lost patience with him at the Cabinet table. This week it insisted on having direct input into how he would respond next to the GSOC debacle.

Independent investigations or examinations are now under way in the penalty points debacle and the GSOC bugging affairl, both having been resisted long and hard by Shatter but which were ultimately forced on him.

Those inquiries may bring unwelcome findings for him in the long term but should provide him with the opportunity to get himself off the ropes for now.