SHAWN POGATCHNIK
Associated Press

DUBLIN (AP) — Ireland’s justice minister resigned Wednesday in a surprise blow to the country’s 3-year-old coalition government after a state-ordered investigation concluded that he mishandled the complaints of a police corruption whistleblower.

Alan Shatter said in a letter he was quitting to ease criticism of the government when the more than 300-page report is published later this week.

Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who received the report Tuesday night, announced the news to the audible gasps of lawmakers in Ireland’s parliament. Many opposition politicians had called for Shatter to quit, but it’s rare in Ireland for any politician to quit regardless of the accusations against them.

Kenny said he accepted Shatter’s resignation “with regret,” but said the report had found that Shatter responded inadequately to complaints of police corruption made by a serving officer, Maurice McCabe. Ireland’s police commander, Martin Callinan, resigned in March over the same scandal.

Shatter was regarded as Kenny’s most intelligent, hard-working and reform-minded minister, but suffered unpopularity because of a perceived holier-than-thou manner and refusal to apologize for mistakes.

Even in his lengthy resignation letter, Shatter admitted no wrongdoing and instead slated the report as biased and incomplete. He noted that the investigator, lawyer Sean Guerin, didn’t interview him and should have, and also had failed to obtain any documents from Ireland’s police complaints watchdog, a central protagonist in the subject under investigation.

Shatter was accused of defending Ireland’s police force at the expense of both the watchdog agency and McCabe. The officer has suffered ostracism from police colleagues since filing complaints that the nation’s system for applying traffic tickets was rife with corruption, involving the systemic “disappearance” of fines and penalties for celebrities, top business people and others with high political connections.

Shatter himself was found to have benefited when, stopped at a road checkpoint screening drivers for alcohol, he was able to avoid taking a Breathalyzer test by claiming his asthma prevented him from blowing into the device.

He was criticized for being too close to Callinan, the police chief who quit weeks after telling a parliamentary committee that the actions of McCabe and a second police whistleblower were “quite disgusting.”

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