Ministers who used their own email for work must come clean: Kelly

MINISTERS should reveal if they have used private email addresses for Government business, Labour TD Alan Kelly has said.

Mr Kelly was commenting on the embarrassing discovery of dozens of emails – which the Department of Justice had repeated claimed did not exist – between Frances Fitzgerald and Terry Prone’s PR firm.

The correspondence came to light when the information commissioner reviewed a Freedom of Information request by transparency group Right To Know.

‘Assure public there is no secret cache’

Mr Kelly said he was ‘gravely concerned about the implications of this for key investigations into areas such as the Charleton Tribunal and the CervicalCheck scandals’.

‘How many emails are flying around between ministers, civil servants and their advisers that we know nothing of?’ he asked.

Mr Kelly is now calling on Leo Varadkar to ensure his ministers ‘disclose whether or not they use private emails for public business’.

He said: ‘The Taoiseach and his ministers should release any such emails on request and ensure that such emails are in future covered by Freedom of Information requests.’

The Labour TD said, in the wake of the CervicalCheck scandal, the email account of the Health Minister should be scrutinised. ‘Simon Harris must assure the public immediately there was no secret cache of emails,’ he said.

Mr Kelly also expressed concern over Charlie Flanagan’s response to his queries earlier this year on the use of private emails. The Justice Minister had assured Mr Kelly that ‘access for all staff of my department to web-based emails is restricted by security infrastructure’.

‘Like most people, officials in the department would have personal email accounts and may occasionally use personal email accounts for workrelated business – this would be rare and born of necessity, for example where ICT systems are inaccessible.

‘All work-related communications, including non-official email accounts, remain subject to relevant regulatory and legislative requirements such as FoI, archives and data protection,’ he said.

However, in light of the revelations, Mr Kelly said this ‘answer does not stand up so well’.

‘Either the minister didn’t know or didn’t want to know about Frances’s cache,’ he said. Mr Kelly said the former minister has serious questions to answer, asking: ‘How do you forget 68 emails?’

The embarrassing records came to light on Friday after journalist Ken Foxe of Right To Know revealed that he had made an FoI request to the department, seeking details of emails between the then justice minister or her private office and Ms Prone or her Communications Clinic firm.

After initially being told no such records existed, Mr Foxe was refused an internal review of the decision before he appealed to the information commissioner Peter Tyndall.

The existence of further correspondence is possible given Mrs Fitzgerald’s personal emails were not included in the search because the department felt it would be inappropriate.

This has been overruled by Mr Tyndall, who directed the department to ask Mrs Fitzgerald if she holds any relevant records on her personal [email].

‘How do you forget about 68 emails?’