General Irish politics discussion thread

Instructing somebody to send in false invoices for a service that was not provided and to send them in, and take money as a result is fraud by two parties.

To miss this for years is gross incompetence.

To obstruct the work of the Committee by drip feeding information is to engage in a cover up of what happened.

To allow somebody walk away with a 500,000 euro severance package and to not have done your duty of reviewing/signing off on it is more gross negligence.

Don't care if you are in a trade Union, or you are left right or totally indifferent. That is what has been uncovered by these committee sessions.

How about the quaint old idea that works in private business - do your job or sling your hook?

FFS, do the 'due process', Nobody is suggesting 'hanging em high'.

Going forward, you won't have any executives of state bodies, because no sensible person would ever take a job on those terms. You would be left with Mick Wallace and Gemma O'Doherty as the only people sane enough to take the jobs.

What has happened to innocent until proven guilty?

I just learned in another thread that the electorate rejected it in a referendum.

It is a pity it was rejected.

i honestly look upon the PAC as a toothless tiger.

When it was revealed that the Audit and Risk Committee (which had failed under it's own terms of reference to spot what was going on) had reccomended that Dee Forbes be asked to resign, thus allowing her to evade accountability it was FG's Brendan Griffin who said that the members of the Executive should be considering their positions.

Of course you will continue trying to claim it is only your political boogeymen and women calling for resignations etc but the facts are the facts here.

Whatever teeth you think they should be given, ministers having the authority to fire employees on the basis of social media complaints should never be one.

Blanch stated that this was your position, I was replying to him and responded accordingly.

From the get-go, you called for the Minister to sack the Executive and sack the Board. You were unaware that the Minister didn't have the power. You have repeatedly claimed that the Executive should all be fired, which is equivalent to a mob hanging someone without a trial.

Is Brendan Griffin on here? I would be very surprised, as my discussions have been with posters, not politicians.

Board members are not subject to the Unfair Dismissals Act, as they are not employees, and it is within the power of the Minister to fire them. They are directors of the company, equivalent to company owners in the private sector, so no political stance issue with any left-winger calling for them to resign (would question the reasons but it would be normal for a left-wing politician to call for the owners of a company to stand down, protecting the employees).

You have been calling for the members of the Executive to be fired by the Minister, who are employees, who have the protection of the Unfair Dismissals Act, and who cannot be fired by the Minister.

Now it is bizarre that you are implicitly criticising a politician who called for the directors to resign while you pursue a vendetta against the employees.

So you fell for the deflection. blanch does this routinely when there is any criticism of government/state bodies. Projects what he thinks is being said in order to deflect the criticism away.

The point was it isn't only a certain political ideology asking for resignations as yourself and blanch are trying to deflect to.

I think they both Boards should be gone on foot of the evidence we have heard to date.

How much 'due process' do you guys want? This all should never have even come before committee.

You have an Executive Board and another Board to oversee that Board, an Audit and Risk committee with all the powers of discovery you can give in their ToR, and instead of sorting this all out internally like any business would, it has now wasted 3 weeks of taxpayers money trying to get past the obsfuscation, covering up/blaming each other/individiuals engaged in by both these boards and we STILL don't know what went on.

It's appalling that anyone would stand over this.

Do you really not understand the difference between asking for the owners and directors of a company to stand down, versus calling for employees to be fired at will? Like seriously?

And why one of these would be completely normal for a left-wing politician and the other would be outside the Pale?

Really, this has been explained to you several times and you keep making the same basic misunderstanding.

As for the rant about the Audit and Risk Committee, several posters, more knowledgeable than I am, have already patiently explained to you how wrong you are about their role in this.

@FrancieBrady

This post (and it wasn't the only post or the only poster) completely demolished your argument that the Audit and Risk Committee were at fault. In fact, they did exactly the job they were tasked to do.

These events happened in 2021 and 2022 which meant they come before the A&R Committee in 2023, which is when they found out and when they acted. They did so quickly once the information was brought to them. No attempt to hide, just investigate the facts and inform the Board. What looks like a good job from outside.

Do you really think that the A&R Committee are in RTE every week pouring over invoices and checking payments? Do you have any understanding of corporate governance?

And please point out to me which part of their job they missed during their four meetings a year?