Justice emails not properly searched following request from Disclosures Tribunal
THE email accounts of senior officials in the Department of Justice’s policing division and secretary general’s office were not initially searched following a request for information from the Charleton Tribunal.
An independent review of the department’s handling of the request for information found there was “no meaningful explanation” for this omission other than officials did not think they were the focus of the tribunal.
The report found the search for documents was “ad-hoc” and there was “little communication” between senior officials regarding the request for information.
The Disclosures Tribunal is investigating allegations there was a Garda headquarters-orchestrated campaign to discredit whistleblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe.
The independent review by barrister Michael Collins was established in the wake of former Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald’s resignation last year.
Ms Fitzgerald stepped down following a controversy surrounding emails she received which detailed an alleged Garda legal strategy aimed at undermining Sgt McCabe.
The former Tánaiste insisted she acted appropriately at all times but resigned so as to avoid a general election.
Mr Collins’s review was aimed at establishing why the emails at the centre of the controversy were not provided to the tribunal when they were sought under a discovery order.
The emails only emerged following a series of parliamentary questions tabled by Labour Party TD Alan Kelly.
The review found Ms Fitzgerald and her officials acted “at all times in good faith and believed they were acting reasonably” when searching for relevant documents.
Mr Collins found “certain shortcomings” in the department’s compliance with the search order but identified no evidence suggesting “deliberate concealment or withholding of material from the tribunal”.
The failure to identify all relevant records relating to
the tribunal was blamed on a lack of a “systematic arrangement for filing emails” which meant important correspondences were not entered into the appropriate file.
“For this very reason, email accounts appear to be an obvious source within which to look for material of potential relevance to the tribunal’ s terms of reference and should have been included in the department’s initial search for documents,” the report said.
“There is a general ance by current and acceptformer officials and at ministerial level, at least with the benefit of hindsight, that an email search should have been conducted from the outset.”
Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said he was concerned that potentially relevant emails were not located as part of the department’s discovery process.
“We have taken important lessons from this episode and my department is actively putting new measures in place that are aimed at ensuring that an oversight of this kind could not happen in future,” he said.