Committee may call for probe into bugging

An Oireachtas committee may call for a commission of investigation into the "GSOC bugging saga" after it holds further sessions with the ombudsman and possibly with retired judge John Cooke.

Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, chairman of the Oireachtas Public Services Oversight Committee, said he didn’t want to pre-empt a decision of the committee, but said it could well make such a call.

The committee has invited GSOC and Judge Cooke to appear before it, but it is not yet known if the retired judge will accept the offer.

Mr Mac Lochlainn said one of the issues that struck him as “suspicious” in the Cooke Report was phone calls by a businessman to a witness from Verrimus security firm regarding his evidence to Cooke. This businessman — an agent for manufacturers of surveillance equipment — appeared to convey, according to Cooke, “concerns that had been expressed to him by contacts in both the Garda Síochána and the Irish Army Security Services”.

In one call, the man said the judge wasn’t “a technical man” and “work was going on behind the scenes to put a man in there”. He said “the boys in green are trying to get a man [in there]”.

He told the Verrimus man this individual was retired.

The judge said that shortly after the inquiry started “the Department of the Taoiseach passed to me a letter containing an unsolicited offer of assistance as an investigator from an individual whose CV indicated 20 years’ experience in intelligence services as an officer in the Defence Forces. The offer was not taken up”.

The judge said the phone calls did not affect the evidence and that he considered it unnecessary to investigate the calls further or to “ascertain whether there was any connection between the assertions made by the caller and the offer of assistance”.

Mr Mac Lochlainn, Sinn Féin’s justice spokesman, said: “It does strike me as suspicious. Judge Cooke said that because it had no influence on his investigation ‘I’ll leave it be’. But it does need to be clarified.”

Security analyst and former soldier Declan Power said: “I think the Justice Committee should ask him [Cooke] about it and depending on that, go from there. It is certainly worthy of further questioning at committee level. But my gut instinct is not to read too much into it. If it was real it would have been finessed more.”

He also said some of the other supposed physical surveillance — such as the men walking near a white van, the photographer and men in baseball caps — was “risible” and reflected a “degree of paranoia”.

Mr Mac Lochlainn said he wanted Judge Cooke to talk about these matters, including the proposition he put into the report that perhaps Garda Security Branch were conducting surveillance on Verrimus and not GSOC.

“Cooke just left that hanging out there, which is most unsatisfactory,” he said. “We [the committee] might recommend a commission of investigation ourselves. I don’t want to preempt, but we may make our own recommendation.”