SAM SMYTH

The journalist caught up in scandal engulfing INM

MY former employers are embroiled in a suspected data scandal, having potentially allowed access to every email and communication I sent and received over two decades of being an investigative journalist at Independent News and Media (INM). It feels sickening – like someone has stolen my very personal diaries of 15 years.

What has happened is complex but here’s a brief run-through: Data relating to a number of former and current staff – including journalists – as well as former directors at INM may have been removed from the company’s premises in 2014, taken out of the jurisdiction and “interrogated” by at least six companies, according to the State’s corporate watchdog.

It included, it is alleged, the emails of at least 19 ‘persons of interest’, including myself. The Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) is now seeking the appointment of inspectors to investigate. Ireland’s richest man Denis O’Brien, with his former closest associate in INM, Leslie Buckley, are associated with the grave allegations – described by a deceptively anodyne phrase ‘suspected data breach’.

The roots of the story lie in a boardroom clash over an apparent attempt to sell a radio station owned by Mr O’Brien, Newstalk, to INM, for a price that the then chief executive of INM, Robert Pitt, said was excessive.

Robert Pitt made a whistleblower’s protected disclosure to the Office of the Director for Corpo- rate Enforcement over that episode and, as a result of investigations into what he has said, news of the data breach has emerged. Mr Pitt has now left the company.

If all this were just about some internal wranglings in a private business, this breach of confidentiality would be bad enough. But we are talking about events in the country’s largest newspaper group and – without sounding too pompous – an organisation that, like all this country’s newspapers, is, as a member of the ‘fourth estate’, a vital pillar of our democracy.

The media’s ability to freely investigate and report events without fear or favour either from government or powerful owners is a principle that must remain sacrosanct.

There is, therefore, a political dimension to these events.

The immediate task of the ODCE is to uncover the IT companies that allegedly ‘interrogated’ the data under the orders of INM’s then chairman Mr Buckley who this week robustly denied any wrongdoing.

But what we do know is that an Isle of Man-registered company owned by INM’s largest shareholder Denis O’Brien, Blaydon, paid the bill for IT company Trusted Data Solutions hired to harvest the information.

After that, our independent corporate inspectors need to determine the legality of how and why INM importuned so much personal data from so many private individuals. But, most of all, we need the Taoiseach to summon up unflinching courage and demonstrate unfailing leadership: our democracy needs defending.

Leo Varadkar has spoken of the importance a free media is to underpin democracy. He has also supported Freedom of Information legislation and, as minister for transport, brought Iarnrod Eireann into the FOI process. His credibility depends on strongly supporting the public now getting full transparency and accountability on the INM data breach – no matter how embarrassing given Mr O’Brien’s longstanding support for Fine Gael.

I write as someone who was unceremoniously dumped from INM with no fanfare after more than 40 years, following the publication of the Moriarty Report in 2011. I had reported on the Moriarty Tribunal and criticised Mr O’Brien for more than a decade.

Known as the payments-to-politicians tribunal, Mr Justice Michael Moriarty found that the then Fine Gael Minister for Communications, Michael Lowry, had benefited by nearly €1m from Mr O’Brien. Mr Lowry had also helped Mr O’Brien’s company obtain the lucrative second mobile phone licence in the mid-1990s. Both disputed Moriarty’s findings but neither challenged them in court.

A decade before the Moriarty Tribunal, I was an in-house hero in INM after exposing Mr Lowry – then a government minister – when businessman Ben Dunne secretly paid €500,000 for refurbishing Mr Lowry’s period mansion in Co Tipperary.

My editor, the late Vinny Doyle, assured me that winning the Journalist of the Year twice, and other awards, had brought credibility to INM. Back then, I was happy working for the Irish Independent where I was encouraged to pursue the foibles of the rich and powerful.

Long after Mr Lowry was forced to resign as a minister, I looked at evidence given to the Moriarty Tribunal and it rekindled my suspicions about the process of awarding the second mobile phone licence.

Years later, Mr O’Brien, whose company Esat Digifone won the competition for the licence, was to become the largest shareholder in INM.

I later found out that, as INM’s chairman, Mr Buckley, who is Mr O’Brien’s closest colleague, had asked the-then chief executive of INM Gavin O’Reilly to have me removed from covering the Moriarty Tribunal (he refused).

The report of the Moriarty Tribunal vindicated my reportage but INM was no longer a comfortable place for me to work and, before I left, the management made strenuous efforts to limit any payment for my decades of service. I was also pushed out from Today FM where I presented a current affairs radio programme for 14 years shortly after Mr O’Brien’s company Communicorp bought the radio station in 2007.

Last Tuesday, I read in INM’s flagship newspaper, the Irish Independent, about a potential breach of my personal data; I felt nauseous.

The people who ordered and paid for the data breach must have shared the information – but with whom? Was the information copied and made available to others after it had been analysed by a vetting team?

Did INM collate the information like Facebook and link individual messages to contacts known only to me? Did they make footnotes on my harvested emails and other correspondence?

I assume they read every message to my editor and colleagues in INM; but they may well also have examined confidential correspondence to lawyers, professionals, even my employment contract discussions with line managers and other individuals to whom I had assured confidentiality – and vice versa.

I do not know the answers although I have written to INM asking for them and understand they have a legal obligation to respond candidly. I have heard nothing from INM since news of my inclusion in their data breach was first reported in the Irish Independent last week.

An assurance from INM that the integrity of their journalists must not be compromised was in the present tense: does that mean it does not apply