Senior civil servant acted as ‘devil’s advocate’

SENIOR civil servant Ed O’Callaghan told the Moriarty Tribunal yesterday he was never put under political pressure in his life.

Formerly with the Department of Communications regulatory division, he described how he acted as ‘devil’s advocate’ on the project team that selected the winner of the competition for the State’s second mobile phone licence in October 1995.

When he read the Danish consultants’ second draft report indicating Esat Digifone was the winner, his purpose was to question it, probe it and test it. “I brought a critical disposition to the report,” he added. “That’s my task.”

Since early December the tribunal has been examining the background to the award of the licence to the Denis O’Brien-led consortium, which also included Norwegian state telecoms company Telenor.

Mr O’Callaghan told Eoghan Fitzsimons SC, for Telenor, he never came across deliberate manipulation of the project team’s work in documents and reports relating to the GSM2 award.

In previous evidence, Mr O’Callaghan said the chairman of the project group, Martin Brennan, told him on October 9 the minister already knew the winner. Mr Brennan’s group was given sole responsibility to carry out an evaluation of the bidders for the licence and to make its recommendation to the minister.

Witness described how, after the project team’s October 23 meeting, he and his regulatory division colleague Sean MacMahon went to department secretary general John Loughrey seeking more time to work on the process.

When he left the meeting with Mr Loughrey he thought they had been given another week but learned the following day minister Michael Lowry would be going to Government on October 25 and then publicly announcing the outcome.

He never saw any evidence that anything in the consultants’ report was being massaged, he told Richard Nesbitt SC, for the Department of Communications. Nobody had prevented him asking questions and he never got the impression that somebody was trying to hide something, or bring about a result that he didn’t agree with.

“I never got that impression,” said Mr O’Callaghan. “I would have aired these issues in so far as I could have in the time available and I didn’t pick up any vibe like that from anybody.”

Answering tribunal lawyer John Coughlan SC, Mr O’Callaghan agreed the quantitative evaluation of applicants did not appear in the final draft report drawn up by independent Danish consultants Andersen Management International. He said he found this surprising.

Replying to Eoin McGonigal SC, for Denis O’Brien, he agreed a lot of the grading of applicants was done by members of sub-committees at meetings not attended by Mr O’Callaghan’s regulatory division.