Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome everybody. I want to continue on a little bit on the train of thought that Deputy Healy-Rae was following. This was considered such a serious issue because we were talking about information that could potentially be very serious - that was being used in investigations and so on - being leaked into the public domain. Mr. O'Brien had grave concerns, and Mr. FitzGerald said last night on the television that he had concerns about articles, quotes and so on that he read in the newspaper and that led him to a "heightened awareness" of risk, as he said. That led to the investigation into the security technologies.

What struck me about Mr. O'Brien's evidence was that four to five people in your organisation knew about the investigation taking place and ruled out or could not definitively say that information was lost. Four to five people knew that. Out of the four to five people who knew that, that report came out into the public domain. We have four to five people in his organisation and therefore we know it is one of those five that was involved in leaking the report. Contrary to what we believed at the start, the security risk is very real, exists today and is something that we have to be very concerned about right now. If a document marked as secret and confined to an inner circle of people can be leaked then anything in your office can be leaked.