'Considerable gap' in producing minutes of controversial meeting says DUP's Brian Kingston
There is a “considerable gap” between the private meeting between Michelle O’Neill and Paula Bradshaw – and the official record of events being written down, a DUP MLA says.
Brian Kingston, one of two DUP MLAs on the troubled Executive Office (TEO) committee, has said the gap makes it sound like minutes were only written down by the First Minister’s Office because the committee requested them.
The “pre-meeting” between chairperson Paula Bradshaw and witness Michelle O’Neill took place on the morning of 23rd October, just hours before MLAs planned to grill her on recent Sinn Fein scandals – including on her employment of now-convicted paedophile Michael McMonagle.
Ms O’Neill was deputy First Minister at the point she employed McMonagle – a role which is has exactly the same responsibilities as the one she now holds.
However, notes of the pre-meeting, seen by the News Letter, weren’t written up until the 28th – after they had been requested by MLAs and this newspaper.
Speaking to the BBC’s Nolan Show, North Belfast MLA Brian Kingston said “five days later makes it sound as if it only happened because the committee requested… minutes of that pre-meeting.
“After what happened at the meeting, we wanted to know what did happen at this pre-meeting of which we were only given 10 minutes notice and we had not approved”.
The committee’s officials did not take their own notes of the meeting, instead they were recorded by the Executive Office.
In Wednesday’s meeting of the TEO committee, Mr Kingston suggested that officials could write up a note now. That would be over two weeks since the meeting happened, and considerably further away from the events than the TEO document was.
He also said: “Chair I think you were put in the position where the First Minister was expecting you to police the questions, and I do think that was unfair on you. I understand about the legal advice, but the whole thing was very unedifying for this committee and the Assembly, it’s not how we want to conduct our business. We’re in a competitive process in politics, but you also have to co-operate with each other”.