No evidence of intent to destroy tapes of phone calls, says Varadkar

Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar has conceded he has seen no evidence to support any suggestion that former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan or any other Garda member planned to destroy tapes of telephone calls to and from Garda stations.

Senior Garda sources have told The Irish Times there were no plans to destroy the recordings.

Mr Varadkar said earlier this week that an internal Garda investigation was set up into the recordings in November by Mr Callinan. He added that Minister for Justice Alan Shatter was not immediately informed about the matter as he should have been and there had "even been inquiries about destroying the tapes".

Yesterday, he said a report for Cabinet on the Garda tapes controversy by Department of Justice secretary general Brian Purcell, which was published on Tuesday, suggested the Garda was preparing to destroy the tapes and was making inquiries to that end.

When pressed on the News at One on RTÉ radio as to whether the report by Mr Purcell constituted the author's interpretation of events or definitive evidence of the Garda's intent to destroy the tapes, Mr Varadkar said "it depends on your reading" of the report.

“I accept it’s not evidence,” he added of the Purcell report.

“There’s no evidence here, there’s different stories . . . [However] the six-page report refers to emails and other evidence.”

The reference to emails related to those sent by Garda Headquarters to the offices of the Data Protection Commissioner and the Attorney General about whether the tapes should be retained or not.

The Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes said this week that on March 19th the Garda had sought his advice on whether the tapes should be destroyed, citing concerns it was in breach of the law in retaining the tapes.

Request for deletion
Mr Hawkes advised that any request for deletion of data would have to be processed via the director of the National Archives. When the Attorney General Máire Whelan's opinion was sought by the Garda, she instructed the next day the recordings should not be destroyed.

However, senior Garda officers insist that Mr Hawkes’s advice and the instruction from Ms Whelan had come about, not because the Garda intended to destroy the tapes, but because Mr Callinan had contacted them in an effort to establish what he should do.

The same sources pointed out that 10 days before the instruction from Ms Whelan, a letter by Mr Callinan to Mr Purcell clearly shows the Garda was readying itself to store the recordings in a more secure and orderly fashion rather than destroy them.

“The recordings are being stored carefully and under secure conditions,” Mr Callinan wrote to Mr Purcell on March 10th.