Ministerial Advisers
Dail Éireann — 2020-09-15
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

She does not ask questions; she deliberately makes assertions to create a propaganda spin, and she is good at it.
Moreover, the Sinn Féin Party is no stranger to special advisers. It invented the whole concept to an extraordinary degree in the Northern Ireland Executive, where it has SPADs, as the Deputy calls them, all over the place. We saw the trouble they got the party into in respect of the debacle over the fuel scheme and so on.
Third, the Deputy has some neck to talk to people about incoherence when Sinn Féin as a party has been in denial for so long about the blatant breaching of guidelines that happened at the late Bobby Storey's funeral. I ask the Deputy to look at how long it took her to apologise for that, yet she attacks everybody else for incoherence and for being in denial. Everyone else in this jurisdiction was accountable for that kind of breach. The Deputy was not accountable and Sinn Féin was not accountable. It is one rule for Sinn Féin and different rules for everybody else in the House. That is the level of incoherence and denial that the Deputy practises, and she is in no position to lecture anybody on these issues.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-09-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:33+00:00
Sitting date: 2020-09-15