Gavan Reilly: Senior hurling demands honesty even from newcomers like Eoin

I’ve never known a press conference like it. It was Tuesday of last week when eight Social Democrats proudly strolled onto the Plinth at Leinster House for what ought to have been something of a victory lap. Then, after four minutes of opening prelude and a few questions about government formation, Eoin Hayes is asked when he sold his shares in Palantir.

For other TDs this would have been a menial thing to answer – if indeed it had come up at all. The Social Democrats, however, have made an electoral ploy of being new and squeaky-clean and not having any skeletons in their closet. They’ve also been right-on when it comes to criticising Israel’s actions in Gaza. Hayes was to the fore on both.

But, as part of his pay deal with a former employer, he was granted shares in the company – and that company, Palantir, has now become immensely valuable because of its contracts supplying software to the Israeli military.

Simply owning the shares only became problematic because the company’s conduct conflicted with Social Democrat policy – but any tardiness on Hayes’ part would have been very lucrative. In the twelve months before getting elected, the share price has gone from $15 to $25.

So it’s a germane question: when did he sell the shares?

And that’s when it all went off the rails. Hayes ducked and dived for 23 minutes, refusing to state when precisely he had sold the shares, clearly raising some suspicion by his failure to give a straightforward answer to a straightforward question. In those 23 minutes, Hayes simply stated two things: that he had sold the shares once he’d realised the extent of Palantir’s involvement in Israel, and that this had happened before his election to Dublin City Council.

And neither, as it turned out, were true.

I hope Hayes has been surrounded by good people in the last week – for a relative novice, the level of attention will have been horrendous. But senior hurlers have to be honest.

Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Columnist with the Meath Chronicle. Column appears first in Tuesday's paper!