The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has been accused of exploiting his position after the Garda provided local crime figures to him and then said it was unable to provide similar information to Fine Gael. Arthur Beesley, Political Reporter, reports.
The claims by Fine Gael were immediately rejected by Mr McDowell, who said he had sought the information on foot of a specific request from the Nutley Area Residents' Association in Donnybrook, south Dublin.
Fine Gael yesterday produced correspondence to Mr McDowell from Donnybrook Garda station in which the force provided a breakdown of crime figures in the Nutley area for 2003.
The party also produced a letter from the same station to its justice spokesman, Mr Jim O'Keeffe, in which the force said it was "unable to answer" all the questions he had asked about crime in the area.
The information was disclosed days after the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, rebuked the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, and the Minister of State, Mr Frank Fahey, for using their Departmental offices to produce election literature.
The correspondence to Mr McDowell's constituency office on April 1st was circulated by the PDs to residents in the area with an election letter from the party's local election candidate.
It detailed the number of incidents in 2003 of burglary, theft, trespass, criminal damage and begging.
Fine Gael released a letter to the Garda from Mr O'Keeffe, who on April 21st sought "detailed crime statistics for the Donnybrook area". In a separate letter, he sought the same information for the Irishtown area.
The Garda response to Mr O'Keeffe gave no information about crime levels. While the letter did provide figures for the number of gardaí deployed in both stations, these were not broken down.
Fine Gael said it did not seek the information from Mr McDowell's Department because the Minister had been able to access the information directly himself. Mr O'Keeffe alleged that the failure to provide information to him that was available to Mr McDowell "appears to continue a pattern of abuse" of Ministerial office.
He went on: "The same information was not made available for me when I sought it in a similar fashion. These statistics should be available to all and not just to a privileged few with access to the Minister."
However, Mr McDowell's spokesman said any suggestion that the Minister had abused his power was "absolute and utter nonsense". Mr McDowell had specifically requested the information from his constituency office because it was a constituency issue, he said. "The Minister did not go through the Department."
He added that the Minister had no idea why Mr O'Keeffe had sought information direct from the Garda. A request for the information to the Department would have been processed in the usual way, he said.
The Garda press office said it was unable to comment.
