Official ‘would have reported pressure’

A CIVIL servant told the Moriarty Tribunal yesterday he would have blown the whistle if he was pressurised from doing his job.

Ed O'Callaghan was a member of the project team that selected the winner of the competition for the State's second mobile phone licence in October 1995.

But he told the tribunal at no time during the evaluation process had he been subjected to any influences he believed would have subverted his independence in doing his job.

The former Department of Communications official admitted being annoyed on learning they were not being given an extra week to complete their work of producing the final report.

He and colleague Sean MacMahon, who were attached to the department's section regulating the telecoms industry, had pressed for more time.

Mr O'Callaghan said he didn't draw any conclusions when told former minister Michael Lowry wanted to bring the GSM2 result to the Government two days after an extra week was offered by John Loughrey, the then-department secretary general.

Tribunal lawyer John Coughlan SC suggested it appeared that things began moving faster when the department's regulatory side began asking questions.

Mr O'Callaghan said the reality a civil servant faced, when a minister wanted something for the next day, was you knuckled down and started doing it.

But he wasn't doing ordinary civil service work in this instance, Mr Coughlan suggested.

Mr O'Callaghan was part of an evaluation process, which was supposed to be sealed, and was conducting his work and bringing it to a conclusion within a time frame when matters began to move very fast, at the instigation of the political side.

Earlier, Mr O'Callaghan told Richard Nesbitt SC, for the Department of Communications, he wouldn't have been shy in coming forward if he had felt he had come under any pressure.

He would have raised it with his own people and/or gone straight to the department secretary.

Eoghan Fitzsimons SC for Telenor Norwegian partners for the licence with Denis O'Brien's Communicorp Group said the facts and the evidence did not in any way establish there was sustained political pressure relating to the GSM process.

Mr O'Callaghan said he could not comment because civil servants stood well back from political matters.

In further examination, Mr Coughlan queried Mr O'Callaghan about a note he wrote to himself setting out the chronology of the final weeks leading to the announcement that Digifone had won the licence.

Mr O'Callaghan found the note among his own papers but sought legal advice from the Chief State Solicitor's office before handing it up to tribunal lawyers.

According to Mr Coughlan, advice was sought on whether it was privileged.