I’m writing this column on Tuesday morning and God only knows whether or not the Government will have fallen by the time you read it. What a mess. What ineptitude. What a downright disgrace. The treatment of Sgt Maurice McCabe, his wife Lorraine and their children would make you hang your head in shame.

I’m thoroughly fed up with all the hype over who told who, what and when. No one is on the side of the angels here and what we need are answers.

During the week I listened in morbid fascination as the head of Tusla, Fred McBride, talked about “an administrative error” and a “cutting and pasting” mistake that allowed a totally false accusation of child sexual abuse be raised against Sgt McCabe. This file was then circulated to senior gardaí. Incredibly, a year after Tusla realised there was no truth to these allegations, the file was still on the system.

Instead of sending a letter of apology a further year later, if I was Mr McBride I’d have been at the McCabe’s front door with my apology. How many other “cutting and pasting” errors has this agency made? Where were the checks and balances to prevent such an occurrence?

Sgt McCabe has been the subject of a base campaign to discredit him. Even though it may seem a bit frivolous, I’m reminded of the story of the woman who went to confession and told the priest that she had been gossiping about her neighbours. Her penance was to wait for a windy day and then to take a feather pillow to the top of the nearest hill and let all the feathers loose in the wind. She then had to remain on the hill until she had collected every single feather. Of course the penance was impossible to complete.

And it is the same with Sgt McCabe who will have to live with the fact that these false allegations were made against him. So he is right to call for a public enquiry. He needs to know if there are other secret files held by State agencies on him and his family. He has nothing to hide so why have another private hearing.

I’m rarely in agreement with Clare Daly but I believe she is right to call for a criminal investigation into all that has happened to Sgt McCabe and his family. We need to know if Garda Commissioner Nóirin O’Sullivan or her predecessor Martin Callinan encouraged or participated in an orchestrated smear campaign of the basest nature to discredit Sgt McCabe. We need to know what’s going on in Tusla and why it circulated false allegations about Sgt McCabe. In short, we need heads to roll.

This shocking state of affairs has got to the stage where ordinary people wonder if they can trust the gardaí any more. Could what was done to the McCabes be done to any of us? It’s one of the pillars of civil society that there is confidence in the gardaí, that policing is impartial and that senior gardaí do the right thing. For the life of me, I can’t see what a general election will achieve in solving this sorry situation. We need answers and it’s up to our politicians to come up with the speediest way of getting those. Justice not only needs to be done here, it needs to be seen to be done. CL