Suspended Timothy Gaston pushes for release of 'contemporaneous' notes of meeting at heart of Stormont row

The TUV MLA – who is currently subject to a two day ban – wants “contemporaneous notes” of a meeting between Paula Bradshaw and Michelle O’Neill to be disclosed by officials, but the Executive Office (TEO) has declined to release them.

Mr Gaston believes they may contain information which would have had a bearing on the standards investigation into an upheld complaint by Ms Bradshaw – but the chair of the committee which sanctioned him has said that was not within the scope of the investigation.

Official minutes – which have been released – weren’t written up by TEO until five days after the meeting happened, and after they had already become a matter of controversy in the media.

He has lodged an appeal about the TEO’s decision with the Information Commissioner, which was expected to rule on the matter in early January – but is yet to come to a decision.

This week MLAs endorsed a report by the Standards Commissioner, which found that Mr Gaston’s conduct at a meeting of the TEO committee in 2024 had breached the MLAs’ code of conduct. It said he had undermined the chair’s authority over repeatedly asking questions she had ruled out of order, and telling her to “breathe”.

The heated meeting had descended into rows over Mr Gaston asking Ms Bradshaw to stand aside as chair, after it had emerged that she met Michelle O’Neill in her office in advance of the Sinn Fein First Minister giving evidence later that day.

The Alliance MLA had denied there was anything untoward about the meeting, saying that she “spoke to” the committee’s legal advice, but did not reveal it to the witness – Ms O’Neill.

The meeting was meant to scrutinise the first minister over her party’s handling of child safeguarding issues and other scandals embroiling her party at the time. However, Ms O’Neill refused to answer any questions she deemed not relevant to her ministerial office.

Mr Gaston told the News Letter: “I have written to the Information Commissioner to formally notify him that the Assembly has now published and relied upon a report which proceeds on the basis that the contemporaneous notes of the private meeting between the First Minister and the Committee Chair, Paula Bradshaw, remain undisclosed.

“The Assembly has imposed a sanction that is inseparable from that meeting, yet neither the Committee nor the public has ever seen the notes taken in the room.

“That is no longer a hypothetical issue. It goes directly to transparency, procedural fairness, and public confidence in how power is exercised at Stormont. At the very least, the public is entitled to know what was recorded at a meeting which has now played such a central role in Assembly proceedings.

“The only record currently available is a minute which was drafted after the event and checked in draft form with Ms Bradshaw. If the informal notes do not conflict with the official minute, there should be no difficulty in releasing them. If they present a fuller or different picture of what took place, then the public interest in disclosure is heightened”.

During Monday’s debate on whether he should be sanctioned with a two day ban from the Assembly, Mr Gaston said it would be “unwise” to make “judgements on what transpired that day in the absence of” the information he is seeking.

However, the chair of the standards and privileges committee, Sinn Fein MLA Cathy Mason, said the body had “noted his earlier correspondence about his freedom of information request when it deliberated on the complaint. As I explained, the Committee needed to keep focused on the elements required to find a breach of the rules in question”.

The official minute of the meeting shows that it was conducted in the First Minister’s office. It included a discussion on specific questions which had been sent to the first minister in advance by the TEO committee. It appeared to suggest that the pair agreed that some were “tenuously linked” to the work of Ms O’Neill’s department.

Ms Bradshaw “reiterated that she would remind members of the Committee’s legal advice before the session commenced”.