PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT TD Richard Boyd-Barrett said that he would not take up Stephen Donnelly’s now vacant seat on the banking inquiry if he was offered it.
Boyd-Barrett said that he believes that fellow Technical Group member Joe Higgins is next in line to take to take Donnelly’s place, but added that all three were conflicted about sitting on the inquiry in the first instance.
“If it was offered to me I wouldn’t take it,” he told TheJournal.ie.
“It’s a joke at this point, the Government are trying to control it, there is no serious effort to get to the bottom of what actually happened.”
Boyd-Barrett explained that himself, Donnelly and Higgins had essentially drawn lots to be selected as the Technical Group’s representative but even then were unsure whether they should take part.
“All of us were torn, both myself and Stephen were very torn as to if we should even put our names forward for it at all.”
Donnelly’s withdrawal comes after a week in which the Government lost its majority on the inquiry and then, after failing to remove a Fianna Fáil Senator, added two Government Senators to ensure a majority.
Junior Minister and Labour leadership candidate Alex White said this afternoon that the banking inquiry should have been ‘left well alone’ after the initial line-up was completed.
Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics, White said that he would have preferred if the original line-up with four Government members out of nine had remained.
Personally I would have left it well alone when the the original choice of members was made. But what’s done is done now and instead of having nine members with a Government majority as was proposed, we now have 11 members with Government majority.
White said that he felt it had “not been a good week for politics in this country” after the Government had altered procedure to add an extra Fine Gael and Labour Senator to the inquiry.
“I don’t think the inquiry is robbed of all credibility,” he said when asked if Donnelly’s withdrawal had fatally flawed it.
“I think what we should do is get on with it now,” he added expressing confidence in chairman of the inquiry, Labour’s Ciarán Lynch TD.
Fianna Fáil’s Marc MacSharry, who the Government tried to remove from the inquiry, disagreed that there was understanding that the Government would have a majority:
Plan A was to discredit myself which failed spectacularly and then Plan B kicked in which was to rip-up the rules of democracy and do what they wanted.
“No party can stand to benefit from the truth coming out more than Fianna Fáil,” he added. “We wanted an independent Leveson style inquiry from the beginning. We didn’t get that.”
Speaking on the same programme, Socialist Party TD Ruth Coppinger says that she believes the inquiry should be made up of groups from outside of politics.
“I think it’s been really cynical. The people who should be in the majority on that inquiry are the people who are affected by the banking crisis…Not the people who cheerleaded the property bubble, it didn’t happen on one night in 2008,” she said.
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