Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 7 September 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence

Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence

Photo of Charles FlanaganCharles Flanagan (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The next speaker is Senator Craughwell.

I thank the Minister for returning to the House to deal with this unfortunate state of affairs. I am somewhat surprised by the apparent unguarded manner in which the Minister oversaw his ministerial responsibility for the security of the information communication from and to his phone, issued to him by the State, as Minister for Foreign Affairs but, more especially, as Minister for Defence. As Minister for Defence, he has ministerial and political responsibility for the Defence Forces, one of the two organs of the State directly responsible for State security and intelligence. His role as Minister for Defence may well have been more crucial to would-be illegal interceptions of his voice and text communications for a more significant reason.

Is the Minister familiar with the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act 1993 which authorised the Garda Commissioner and the Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces to seek an order from an authorised officer, a judge of the High Court, to intercept postal and electronic messages under section 6 of said Act? Was the Minister's phone issued to him by the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Defence or the Defence Forces? If it was issued to him by the Defence Forces, I believe it would have been an encrypted phone from the Defence Forces' communications and information systems corps, as befits the role of a Minister overseeing one of the two security and intelligence services of the State.

Given the Minister's role and Ireland's seat on the United Nations Security Council, did the communications and information system issue him with an encrypted phone? Did he request an encrypted phone? If the Minister is not working off an encrypted phone, does he accept this would be reckless behaviour in the extreme, betraying and compromising State security and the messages from a foreign minister of a country on the UN Security Council? This would beggar belief. I ask the Minister straight out - yes or no - whether the political gravity of the interceptions of his voice and text messages occurred to him at all.

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