Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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210. To ask the Minister for Social Protection if he or any Minister of State under his Department uses a personal e-mail account for work purposes; the security controls in place regarding the use of personal e-mail accounts for Department related business; if his Department has a policy on this matter; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [5260/17]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The Minister uses his department email for government business. He does have a private email address which he uses for personal and party matters, and which to the best of his knowledge has not been used for other purposes. Minister McGrath does not have a personal e-mail account.

The Department has well defined policies in relation to the use of email and internet services.

Every staff member is provided with a corporate email account that is hosted on the Department’s secure network. These corporate accounts are used for all email communications within the Department and to external bodies.

Access from the Department’s network to all web-based email is blocked as is access and use of web-based file sharing services associated with these services. This blocks all access to sites such as Gmail, Hotmail, iCloud, GDrive, OneDrive, Mega, Dropbox etc. Attachments on emails from web-based email providers are blocked from being downloaded. Size limits are set on all email attachments entering and exiting the Department. All email entering and exiting the Department is scanned for malware and viruses.

The Department has a well-defined methodology for pushing software security patches out to our fleet of desktop devices. This is done to protect services running on the Department’s network.