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Séamus Woulfe drove back to join his family on vacation in Donegal after attending the Oireachtas Golf Society outing and dinner in Clifden on August 20.
Before I went to bed that night, I reverted to my addiction to the news, and I lit the news headlines in, I know I shouldn’t, in the Examiner newspaper and I was surprised to see that they had as their main story something about Dara Calleary attending to a golf dinner.
“I said, ‘This is the largest amount of garbage that ever existed.’ I thought, ‘God, they’re really scraping the barrel here during the goofy August season,’ Woulfe told former Chief Justice Ms. Susan Denham.
The following day, according to a transcript of the meeting released yesterday, he was astonished to see the controversy that claims the short-lived ministerial career of Dara Calleary.
“I was absolutely dumbfounded and shocked,” the Supreme Court Justice told Justice Denham as part of his review of her attendance at the dinner.
He had driven to Galway on August 18 and had not read the newspapers the next morning, partly because he was on vacation. He had not learned of a government decision made the day before to change the rules on indoor gatherings, he says.
The former attorney general explained to Judge Denham how the Covid-19 recommendations of the National Public Health Emergency Team go to the Government for a decision, and some of them subsequently end up as statutory instruments.
A government decision on the new powers of Covid-19 could not take effect immediately. So even though the decision on the meetings was announced before dinner, it hadn’t gone into effect when it took place.
Enigma of the apology
Judge Woulfe said he spoke to one or two people after Mr. Calleary’s resignation and decided that he would apologize for attending the dinner “because one or two other people had apologized for any inadvertent breaches of the guidelines on my part. Now I was a bit hesitant to do it because I wasn’t sure why I was apologizing. “
“I was receiving journalists who called me, sent me text messages, that people asked me to resign before knowing the facts that Friday morning.”
The rules regarding the meetings did not change until August 31, he said: “So there is so much misrepresentation and false reports everywhere.”
“He was probably in shock to some degree that Friday morning. But the apology was genuine and I repeat it here again, for the record. “
He said that what had happened in the aftermath of the dinner “appears to have been what I would describe as the launch [of] a tank of gasoline in a small flame by forcing Dara Calleary to summarily resign without any chance to verify the facts on Thursday morning, which seems to have ignited the whole maelstrom. “
He said he couldn’t understand why the “poor man” wasn’t given at least 24 hours. “Does our Constitution mean nothing? Are politicians totally devoid of constitutional rights? “
Pointing to the feverish atmosphere of the time, he said: “My understanding is now, and from what I have heard and everything I have read, there was massive confusion, if not chaos in the Government this week. And you have to take into account August, people on vacation, the Attorney General maybe in Kerry or wherever he’s on vacation. “
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