Sinn Féin’s Ó Broin apologises to civil servant he said should be sacked

Sinn Féin housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin has apologised directly to a senior civil servant he said should be sacked, telling him he regretted the “wholly inappropriate” comment.

Mr Ó Broin made the comments at the Night & Day music festival in Roscommon in September, and they were later reported by the Daily Mail newspaper. During a discussion on housing policy, Mr Ó Broin said he believed the chief economist in the Department of Finance, John McCarthy, “should be sacked”.

Mr Ó Broin wrote to Mr McCarthy earlier this month, after the issue prompted a political backlash and strong criticism for the Dublin Mid West TD.

“I hope you don’t mind me e-mailing you directly but I wanted to apologise to you for comments I made at a debate on housing at a festival in Roscommon a number of weeks ago. The remarks were wholly inappropriate and I have publicly retracted them,” he wrote in an email released to The Irish Times under Freedom of Information legislation.

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“I apologise for unnecessarily drawing you into this public debate and wish again to reiterate my regret that I made these remarks in the first instance”.

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In a response the same day, Mr McCarthy wrote that he appreciated Mr Ó Broin writing to him.

“While it has been a difficult few days for myself and my family, I want you to know that I fully accept your apology. As far as I’m concerned, we can now consider the matter closed and draw a line under it,” he wrote.

At the festival, Mr Ó Broin was reported to have said: “You have a guy who knows nothing about housing, nothing at all. He is very, very orthodox, I would almost argue evangelical, economist, in terms of seeing things. He was the kind of economist who advised governments to do the sort of things they did before the crash and he is still in the position he is in”.

The Sinn Féin housing spokesman was strongly criticised by the Government after the comments, with Tánaiste Leo Varadkar describing them as “chilling” and Taoiseach Micheál Martin saying “these type of personal derogatory comments about civil servants have no place in Irish politics.”

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Sinn Féin also distanced itself from the remarks, with frontbench spokespersons describing them as inappropriate and saying they diverged from the party’s position.

In 2021, Mr McCarthy was internally critical of an ESRI report which argued that the state should borrow between €4 billion to €7 billion annually to invest in housing. He said at the time that constraints and structural problems other than funding were to blame for the crisis in housing, rather than a focus on providing more money.