Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

Prior to that it was done by warrant under some postal Act of the late 19th century and a decision of the Court of Appeal or the House of Lords had interpreted the term "postal packet" as being broad enough to include a telephone call.

That was some creative judging. It was on that flimsy basis that this kind of work was done until comparatively recently.

In 1993 the Government introduced legislation to deal with this issue. The position at present is that there is no supervision whatsoever afterwards of whether a particular application was justified or unjustified. There is no mechanism to look back at it to review it. I emphasise this has to do with data, not what is said in the course of a telephone conversation, merely the fact that A telephoned B at a particular time and the telephone call took X amount of time. That is the kind of data we are talking about.