A review examining why certain documents at the Department of Justice were not handed over to the Charleton Tribunal, contributing to the resignation of former justice minister and tanaiste Frances Fitzgerald, has found email accounts of senior officials were not searched.
Last December, senior counsel Michael Collins was asked to review why emails from May and July, 2015 were not sent to the tribunal until November last year.
The emergence of these emails eventually led to the resignation of Ms Fitzgerald, while almost bringing down the Government.
They dealt with the legal strategy employed by An Garda Síochána in relation to Garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe.
In his report, published on Tuesday evening, Mr Collins said there were “shortcomings” in the Department’s response to the tribunal requests for documents but that there was “no evidence to suggest any deliberate concealment or withholding of material”.
The findings have been accepted by Ms Fitzgerald’s successor, Charlie Flanagan, who said changes would be implemented to better facilitate any future searches for relevant information within its computer systems.
Mr Collins explained that officials had initially confined their search to three sources of data within the policing division, including legal records and an electronic document library.
“Crucially, this initial search for documents did not include the email accounts of officials in the Policing Division or senior officials in the Department or the Secretary General’s office. No meaningful explanation has been provided for this omission,” Mr Collins reported.
“There is a general acceptance by current and former officials and at ministerial level, at least with the benefit of hindsight, that an email search should have been conducted from the outset.”
Neither was there a systematic process for filing emails within the Department, he said.
The contentious emails in question had not been found during the search, he wrote, due to a failure to file them at the time of being sent or received, and the failure to include email accounts in the initial search. Mr Collins described the search processes generally as “ad hoc”.
In the end, the documents came to light following a parliamentary question and a press query last November. The ensuing scandal placed Ms Fitzgerald under intensifying pressure, drawing her resignation before collapsing the Government.
Mr Collins said that to some extent, the Department’s handling of the matter reflected a “view at senior level” that it had a peripheral role in the tribunal’s terms of reference.
“The principal issue of general concern identified in the Review relates to the lack of a clear system for the filing and storage of emails,” he said.
The review also suggested some changes, including a possible formal approach to dealing specifically with tribunals and commissions of inquiry, a greater reliance on external IT support and a forthcoming new electronic documents system being introduced across the civil service.
In his response, Mr Flanagan said these changes would be implemented and that he was “concerned that emails of potential relevance to the tribunal’s considerations were not located as part of the Department’s discovery process”.
Mr Flanagan said his Department had subsequently hired an external IT company to trawl 30 million emails, leading to the identification of 79 additional documents of “potential relevance”.
“The review notes that this search provides an appropriate degree of confidence that the Department has identified and supplied all material of potential relevance to the tribunal,” he said.
