The Willie O'Dea affidavit incident or Brothelgate[1] was a 2010 political controversy in Ireland involving Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea.
Enda Kenny, leader of main opposition party Fine Gael, accused O'Dea of having committed perjury after it emerged remarks which he had sworn under an affidavit not to have said had in fact been said. The remarks related to the alleged connection between a brothel and Sinn Féin politician Maurice Quinlivan. These allegations were later proven to be untrue.[2] O'Dea and Quinlivan had settled High Court damages over the incident in December 2009. However, increasing parliamentary pressure in February 2010 propelled the affair back into the spotlight. O'Dea resigned as Minister for Defence on 18 February 2010, with Taoiseach Brian Cowen assigning himself temporary responsibility for the Department of Defence.
Stephen Collins, writing in The Irish Times, suggested "Relations between the Coalition partners [Fianna Fáil and the Green Party] may never be the same again after the resignation of Willie O'Dea".[3] According to the Evening Herald, the departure of O'Dea was "the first major casualty of the coalition government".[4] The same newspaper noted that the resignation of O'Dea was the third in two "absolutely calamitous" weeks, following the unexpected departures of George Lee and Déirdre de Búrca from Fine Gael and the Green Party respectively.[5]
As the Brothelgate crisis deepened, members of the parliamentary party scrambled to see if Willie O'Dea's promised vindication would be contained in the pages of the paper's country edition.