Monitoring surveillance intercepts in Ireland

The level of public oversight on the Irish state's phone tapping and other intercept activities is a joke.



Tapping the wrong phone happens more often then you'd like to think if Britain is anything to go by. There were 50 errors there in 2008 among the .5m intercepts recorded in the report (see pg 11) of the UK's Interception of Communications Commissioner. That's up from 24 mistakes detected in 2007.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation say these statistics for the UK are not enough and even more oversight is needed. Yet in Ireland we won't even reveal how many intercepts are carried out each year. The Dept of Justice refuses to release the data even under Freedom of Information - citing security reasons.

We employ a High Court judge to check whether the gardai or the army have done anything wrong like mistakenly tapping the wrong phone. Thankfully we don't pay this judge anything extra on top of his normal salary for doing this work.


The gardai's spying is carried out by its Crime and Security division based in Phoenix Park. Once a year a High Court judge visits the park and two other sites (on the same day!) to check whether the guys doing the phone tapping have been following the rules.



As TJ McIntyre, head of Digital Rights Ireland, pointed out earlier this year the level of detail in these reports is underwhelming. Following on from TJ's post we unearthed all the reports filed over the years and found them to be remarkably similar and lacking in detail. They don't even tell us how many intercepts were performed by each agency.

We should be aspiring to a model of regulation at least as detailed as the UK's as TJ wrote earlier this year.


Judge Iarfhlaith O'Neill has recently filed his report for 2009. It is open for him to give more detail to the public but Judge O'Neill is obviously not a man who wants to break with tradition. See if you can spot any differences between his '08 and '09 reports as submitted to the Oireachtas.

There was an interesting debate on this legislation in 1993 when Willie O'Dea, then a junior minister, revealed there were 40 intercepts in operation in the state. This number is likely to have increased substantially since 1993. O'Dea said at the time it would be up to the judges to decide whether they would include statistics in their reports. Unfortunately none have.

One of those calling on the government to establish a more transparent system in that 1993 debate was Mary Harney, a then opposition TD. Now that Harney is in power she was part of a cabinet that approved a similar system that assured us that "judicial oversight" of state surveillance would be a sufficient safeguard for the public. Once again, however, there were no assurances that any information on mistakes or errors would be made public.

Dermot Ahern passed the new covert surveillance bill in July. The operation of surveillance by security forces under this bill is monitored by Judge Kevin Feeney, of the High Court. It will be interesting to see if Feeney's annual report will be in anyway more detailed than the useless reports filed by O'Neill and his predecessors.

Getting onside and up close with the taxman

As well as getting a Freedom of Information request back last week about the judges, (more about that later) Revenue also responded to a request I made for information about what corporate hospitality its senior staff had accepted over the last year.

I wasn't quite sure what we'd find or if there would be a story in it. But what we got back was fascinating.

Full story here.

It turns out that several senior officials are getting tickets to sports and cultural events from private companies. The most interesting record released, however, contained details of an invite to Josephine Feehily, Revenue's chairman. Feehily attended a private dinner held in Matheson Ormsby Prentice (MOP) solicitors' office to give a talk on tax affairs to a select group of 25 Irish company directors.

The Chatham House Rule applied to all discussions at this meeting.

See the invite here, and page two.

As quoted in the story Revenue said there was nothing inappropriate with Feehily attending such an event.
“It would have been remarkable if the chairman had not accepted the opportunity to address directors in relation to tax and governance matters," it said.

There are obvious benefits for the business people attending this in-camera briefing with the head of Revenue which the invite describes as "mutually beneficial". I'm not too sure what good it did Revenue though as it didn't expand on the above statement.

Laura Magahy, then president of the Institute of Directors in Ireland, was the woman in charge of the event. Magahy has a great track record in winning state contracts for her company. As Pat Leahy quotes an "informed source" in a profile of Maghahy in 2002:
"She's a real can-do operator. She could get anything she wanted out of civil servants. A lot of people think she is brilliant."

Magahy is obviously still in favour with the powers-that-be with her recent appointment as Chairman of the Crafts Council of Ireland. Though this even raised heckles in Fianna Fail.

We don't at this stage know who all the other 25 directors at this dinner were. Liam Quirke, from MOP, is the only other person named on the email.

Incidentally, MOP were one of six firms that won a competitive tendering process earlier this year to get a six year contract to recover tax for Revenue.

AIB's developers

I've previously posted here about Declan Maher, AIB's branch manager in Clifden, who also ran a side-business in developing land in Florida.

Maher's side-job is small potatoes compared to John Hughes and Tommy Hopkins. We published a piece about their development interests a few weeks ago. It will be interesting to see if the regulator takes any action over this.

It seems bizarre that two bank managers in charge of lending to developers can themselves be running large development companies.

Colm Kenna has also written about these guys and their extensive property portfolio.

If anyone out there has had business dealings with the two AIB developers I'd be interested to hear about it.

On a side-note I've been a bit tardy putting stuff up here but hope to get more regular at posting stuff up from now on.

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback and tips on stories.