Results 5,641-5,660 of 40,897 for speaker:Simon Coveney

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: That is an interpretation the Deputy is trying to put on it.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: No, the Deputy is not right. He is trying to infer a whole series of political charges there that simply are not true.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: I will advise the former Secretary General, Mr. Burgess, to make a brief comment. I refer to the inference in the previous series of questions that I somehow instructed the Department to create a job. That is not the case. Anybody who knows the former Secretary General of my Department and how my Department functions knows that it says "No" to me when it does not agree with a decision or...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: As the former Secretary General said, there was no political input on the work that the Department did on this. This was technical work from experts in different sections of the Department. There was a food-for-thought paper, prepared in the context of Department of Foreign Affairs responsibilities as well as of the implementation of the national LGBTI+ inclusion strategy, which was...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: Yes, I think it would have been helpful, with the benefit of hindsight, if I had responded to that text. As the Deputy will see from a lot of her texts, I did not respond to-----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: I had spoken to her on two dates, on 26 February, when I basically told her I had spoken to the Secretary General about whether we could use her, which she was happy about, but I said there was no role at that stage. I asked her what she was doing. She confirmed she was working with the UNFPA until the middle or the end of June. When I came back to her, I said we were looking to develop...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: Can I make one further comment just briefly on it? The end of June was Pride week. When I said to her the Department was going to work on this, I did say to her I hoped we would be able to have the process in the Department done by this summer, by Pride week. She clearly took from that that she wanted a job to be announced at that point.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: That is my view. I never felt pressure from Katherine Zappone in relation to this job. If I had, I would have been responding to her. If anything, I could be potentially criticised for largely ignoring her texts.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: I do not accept that interpretation of events. The Minister, Deputy Donohoe, is a friend of Katherine Zappone. I do not know how many times he has spoken to Katherine at various different times in the last year, but she asked him for advice at some point late last year. The Minister suggested to her that she make contact with me to get advice on a career in the UN because I am the Minister...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: No, they do. To be fair, I am sometimes contacted by people who I do not know at all seeking advice in relation to career choices and so on. I did not see this as any different from that. I certainly did not see it as formal lobbying.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: As I said last week, I clear texts from my phone when conversations conclude. There is a security element to that. I do not want to overplay the security issue but it is an issue for me. As a matter of course, when I do not think it is necessary to have text messages on my phone because something has concluded and we are moving on from it, I often clear the phone of those text...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: I cleared it shortly after that conversation. I went to Africa the following day and I certainly did not hang on to that text because I thought there was a start and an end to it; he asked a question and I responded to it. If I was trying to hide the existence of text messages, I would not have made all my text messages available through the FOI request. If I was trying to hide the text...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: What I have said clearly is that that text exchange was deleted from my phone before the freedom of information requests came in.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: I know that Senator Craughwell understands security issues well. The phone that I use has been issued to me by the Department of Foreign Affairs. I am cautious about the use of that phone because it has been compromised. It is a matter of public record and was featured in the media last year in that in August 2020, I was subject to a phishing attack via the Telegram messaging application...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: -----officials. I would just-----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: Well, I would like to answer the Senator's question. I would like to-----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: I would like to answer the Senator's question, if I may. He asked me whether I was aware of the political consequences of that and I was. Officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Defence determined that this incident fell into the realm of a cyberattack and made the appropriate notifications to An Garda Síochána. I handed my phone over to An Garda...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: Yes.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: I will happily answer that. In relation to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, my Department did not seek sanction from the Department in respect of this position. My Department has a pay and staffing sanction from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that did not require additional approval for this post. Having said that, my Department did make contact - I think...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence: Appointment of Special Envoys: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence (7 Sep 2021)

Simon Coveney: In terms of things like travel arrangements and so on, I asked my former Secretary General to negotiate with Katherine Zappone and to outline to her what was involved in the position. If it is helpful, I can ask him to talk the Senator through that, but it is certainly nothing unusual. We used the precedent of another special envoy who is in the Department, the special envoy for francophone...