Ireland’s Prime Minister in Crisis Over Case of Police Whistle-blower
At one point, Mr. Kenny called Mr. Adams an "absolute hypocrite"
and attacked him for playing down, years earlier, the case of a former Sinn Fein member who said she was sexually abused by IRA members — a charge that Mr. Adams denies.
McCabe said that And I therefore offer a full apology to Maurice McCabe
and his family for the treatment handed out to them as exposed in recent programs.
Dermot Walsh, a law professor at the University of Kent in England who has studied police and criminal justice in Ireland, said the uproar "was not so much what he was complaining about as the fact
that he took his complaints outside the force — in other words, he was seen as not a team player, not a member of the club." Professor Walsh added that Sergeant McCabe "had stepped over to the other side of the line between ‘them’ and ‘us,’" and compared the case to that of Detective Serpico.
Another whistle-blower, Superintendent David Taylor, a former police press officer, has come forward to say
that the existence of a smear campaign against Sergeant McCabe was widely known within the police force and by his superiors, including Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan.
The task was originally assigned to a private commission of inquiry, led by a judge,
but after the latest furor, Mr. Kenny agreed to appoint a tribunal, whose proceedings will be open to the public — something that Sergeant McCabe said he believed was essential.
Mr. Kenny failed at first to give a complete account of when he learned of the false abuse allegations, and has insisted
that he knew nothing of a broader smear campaign — an assertion that his critics in Parliament have contested.
In 2014, the justice minister, Alan Shatter, resigned after a report commissioned by the government found
that the government and the police had failed to adequately address Sergeant McCabe’s allegations.
