Sir, – Joe Ainsworth, former deputy commissioner of the Garda Síochána (Opinion, October 10th), makes the following statement: “The Arnold/Kennedy taps were put in place to establish where leaks from the cabinet and government departments were springing; not to gather political gossip. The leaks may have involved breaches of the Official Secrets Act insofar as the leakers were concerned. When it became clear that the phone taps were not going to assist in this regard, I terminated them”.
The tapping of telephones at the time was strictly regulated to the surveillance of those engaged in subversive action against the State or those in communication with such engaged persons. These regulations were publicly known. They had existed at least since the 1960s, were strengthened in the early 1970s and they were confirmed to the Dáil. They were later outlined in some detail by two former justice ministers, Gerry Collins and Desmond O’Malley, both of whom stressed that the initiation of taps came from the commissioner or deputy commissioner, not from the minister. Mr Ainsworth’s transgression of these regulations led to his enforced resignation from office. It is inconceivable that this senior police officer who was responsible for such security matters did not appreciate that the instruction from Mr Doherty to put on the taps to discover leaks from government represented the turning upside down of the key regulations applying to what he did.
The casual explanation from the former deputy commissioner indicates decisions and actions that intruded unnecessarily into the privacy of three people and wrongly violated their constitutional rights. In the subsequent High Court judgment it was stated that the tapping of our telephones could not “be tolerated in a democratic society such as ours is and our Constitution requires it to be”. The court’s judgment also was that “the infringement was carried out deliberately, consciously and without justification by the State which is under a constitutional obligation to respect, vindicate and defend” the victims and their rights, notably the right to privacy. Mr Ainsworth was the principal figure involved in carrying out this breach of regulations that he must have understood as governing his job.
It is a matter of regret provoking disbelief that Mr Ainsworth takes what I can only describe as a casual and largely irrelevant view of his momentous acts and responsibilities at the time.
In my own case it would have become clear within a week that no leaks in breach of the Official Secrets Act were likely to derive from the surveillance, nor did I write with any possible knowledge of information from within the cabinet or government departments. Yet Mr Ainsworth maintained the taps on my phone from May 10th to July 12th, 1982. No taps were placed on the politicians with whom I was allegedly talking.
The High Court subsequently found the actions for which Mr Ainsworth was responsible were an abuse of mine and my family’s constitutional right to privacy. His actions as a law officer were clearly not carried out to protect my privacy but to provide the then head of government, Charles Haughey, or Seán Doherty, minister for justice at the time, or both of them, with information of a political nature. Political responsibility for this, shouldered for a decade by Seán Doherty, minister for justice, which I am sure was known to Mr Ainsworth, was identified by Mr Doherty 10 years later as the responsibility of Charles Haughey and led to his downfall as Fianna Fáil leader. These should have been Mr Ainsworth’s views in what he wrote and I regret very much the glaring omissions. – Yours, etc,