Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

While I cannot answer on behalf of a third party, the real world experience is that I have had, I think, four different official email accounts in the past seven years. The first was in the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, which was quickly shut down when I moved from the Department. A couple of weeks later, I got an email account for the Department of Health and I subsequently got email accounts for the Departments of Social Protection and the Taoiseach. Many people know me either personally, through business or through work longer than I have been Taoiseach. They have my personal email account and they will email me to that account on occasion because that is the email address they have had for me for years and it may be programmed into their phone.

I comply with my Department's policy which does not forbid the use of private emails. It requires one to make sure they form part of the public record. There are three ways to do this. One can print it and add it to a file; one can forward it to oneself or someone in the Department in order that it is within the public domain; or one can make sure that in the email thread there is somebody with a departmental address. As the Deputy will know, the email to which he is referring was on the public record and released under the Freedom of Information Act for precisely that reason.