Alan Shatter, the justice minister, suggested to an HSE whistleblower, who was on enforced sick leave after reporting an alleged €500,000 deception to gardai, that he use the services of Gallagher Shatter.

Shatter was Fine Gael’s frontbench spokesman on children when he offered, on two occasions in March 2009, to introduce Thomas Cleary to his firm for legal assistance.

Cleary, 66, was a capital-projects manager in the HSE estates department in June 2008 when he filed a complaint of false accounting by a contractor to the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation. He says, after he wrote to James Reilly, then Fine Gael’s health spokesman, Shatter visited his home at Foxrock, which is in the Dublin South constituency.

“After [speaking to] me on my doorstep in