Fennelly Commission says brief could ‘take decades’

Recordings of telephone calls to Garda stations are so extensive it could take “many decades” to analyse them, the Government has been told.

The Fennelly Commission was asked to investigate the extent and nature of recordings of the “non-999” calls to certain stations over a 30-year period. It was also asked examine circumstances surrounding the retirement of former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan.

The commission was specifically asked to look at “the apprehension that telephone recordings to and from Bandon Garda Station might indicate unlawful and improper conduct by gardaí involved in the investigation into the death of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996”.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has confirmed Mr Justice Nial Fennelly would provide an interim report early this year. It will cover the circumstances leading up to the retirement of Mr Callinan and the subsequent resignation of former minister for justice Alan Shatter.

However, in its first interim report, published recently on the website of the Department of the Taoiseach, the commission said it was examining whether the work could be done through “ a properly constructed sampling formula”.

While it noted it was to examine recordings from January 1980 to November 2013 – a timeframe of 33 years – inquiries had not located any recordings for the period 1980 to 1994. It said the recordings that had been located were in two categories: tapes from 1995 to 2008; and disks from 2008 to 2013.

Extensive recordings

In the section from 1995 to 2008 alone there were more then 3,000 “Dat” (digital audio tape) cassettes, each of which could record on up to eight channels simultaneously, “giving a potential maximum of 320 hours of recorded material per cassette”.

With 3,000 cassettes the potential is for 960,000 hours of tape.

The commission said it is unclear how many hours of recorded conversation there were on each tape, but it noted “it is reasonable it would take years, if not decades, to listen to all of the recorded material from the period 1995 to 2008.

The disk system for recording calls recorded between 2008 and 2013 was called the “Nice” system, and the commission said it is likely that it will also run into many years in duration.

The commission said the issue was whether the work could be done through “a properly constructed sampling formula”. It is also engaged with the Law Society of Ireland to identify a method for establishing whether calls to and from solicitors were recorded and if so, whether the recordings were ever accessed.

Mr Kenny has previously said he expects the interim report would also deal with a letter written by Mr Callinan.

The letter warned Mr Shatter via then secretary general of the Department of Justice Brian Purcell that the existence of the recordings had emerged during the discovery process in a high-profile legal case.

There was a near two-week delay in that letter being passed by Mr Purcell’s office to Mr Shatter, both of whom have since departed those offices.