Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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463. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if his Department uses anti-profanity software in its email systems and online contact forms; if so, the level of human oversight that is applied to the monitoring of this software and its effectiveness; his views on whether persons' legitimate right to petition Government may be blocked unintentionally by errors in the use of such software in determining that which qualifies as profanity being communicated in email and-or online contact forms; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2084/18]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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The Department of Education in Skills has email filtering in place which endeavours to quarantine incoming emails that are categorised as containing profanities.  The email filtering also endeavours to quarantine incoming email categorised as being of excessive size, containing viruses/malware/executables, originating from sites with a poor reputation or spam.  

Specifically in relation to profanity, all my Department's incoming email communications are routed through a commercial email filtering system which endeavours to quarantine emails that are categorised as containing profane text or images.  The system’s profanity filtering capabilities are based on the sender's reputation as well as internal dictionaries and other technology proprietary to the vendor of the email filtering system. 

All emails that are quarantined for reasons of profanity are notified to the intended recipient who is advised of the sender and the subject line of the quarantined email.  Once the intended recipient declares that the email is business related they are released from quarantine, otherwise they are deleted after fifteen days.  My Department’s email filtering system therefore facilitates the notification to the intended recipient of all emails quarantined for reasons of profanity, including those blocked inadvertently and allows for their release.  

In relation to the level of human oversight of incoming emails that are quarantined for reasons of profanity, both the intended recipient as already outlined and also the IT system administrators have oversight of the email filtering system.  The email filtering function provides the Department with the ability to edit and amend the profanity filters as well as perform its own content filtering.

There is currently no filtering in place in respect of the Department’s online forms.