Email trawl for Charleton Tribunal omitted Frances Fitzgerald

The email accounts of former minister for justice Frances Fitzgerald and her political advisers were not examined in the recent trawl for documents relevant to the Charleton Tribunal.

The development comes as the Department of Justice was yesterday swayed at the Oireachtas Justice Committee into asking the Charleton Tribunal if it wanted the department to conduct a widespread trawl to unearth remaining paper documentation and to extend searches to include private emails and mobile phones.

A response by Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan to a parliamentary question from Social Democrats joint leader Roisin Shortall confirmed that the trawl last month of department emails revealing details of the former garda commissioner’s legal strategy against whistleblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe did not include Ms Fitzgerald’s accounts.