Month: April 2006

Camera phones for gardai suggested

In the just off-the-wall-enough-to-be-implemented category, the idea from McDowell is that Gardai should be able to take photos of public order/offence suspects as a matter of course. And the rationale? In case people give false name and addresses. It sounds more like a national database for the Gardai by the backdoor to me. Let’s read the meat:

Mr McDowell told TDs he envisaged “the day, now that we are in the era that most of us carry a camera in our phone, that gardaí on duty dealing with a disorder situation, where they ask someone for their name and address, would also take a photograph of them so they know who they were dealing with afterwards, and that somehow this would be digitally sendable back to some record somewhere so that it is kept.

“I don’t see that this is a huge civil liberties issue,” he said. “It does seem to me that we will soon get to the point that every squad car has a mobile computer attached to it and will be in a position to communicate back.”

Mr McDowell also said he would like to see closed circuit television monitoring installed throughout every Garda station, which would be in addition to recording interviews.

The Garda is planning to introduce a new €6 million computer and camera system for Garda traffic corps vehicles which will be able to read car registrations and which will be linked to the Garda pulse system.

It means any vehicles which are not taxed or insured or which have been reported stolen will trigger a warning notice on an in-car computer screen.

Would anyone else have a problem being photographed as a matter of course for even being suspected for such a minor offence?

Aquatic centre eviction decision to be appealed

The saga rolls on, after their recent defeat in the High Court…

The operators of the National Aquatic Centre, Dublin Water World Ltd (DWL), plan to appeal a High Court decision to evict them from the troubled swimming arena.

Their removal from the centre is due on Friday April 28 and they will also be seeking a stay on this.

The legal saga over the ill-fated arena has already cost DWL and the landlords of the centre Campus Stadium Ireland Development Ltd (CSID) at least €1.5m in legal costs.

This is fifteen times the €100,000 annual rent the operators failed to pay CSID – one of the main reasons a move was made to evict.

Outlining the grounds for the appeal, a DWL spokesman said: “CSID admitted as late as July 2005 that the building snagging and defects completion process [as required in the contract] remains incomplete.” DWL as a result, he claimed, had lost money and this was compounded by the unexpected five-month closure of the centre from January 2005 after part of its roof blew off.

A key element of DWL’s Supreme Court appeal was a clause in the lease requiring payment of IR£500,000 to CSID over five years. “DWL,” he said refuse to pay this, after “uncovering a multitude of defects”.

Audit critical of PPARS contract

More interesting PPARS stuff:

The internal audit report was sought by the HSE several months ago in the wake of strong criticism from Fine Gael about some of these consultancy contracts.

Fine Gael revealed that €2 million had been paid to Blackmore Group Assets Ltd, which it maintained was a shelf company based in the British Virgin Islands and administered from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

The Irish Times understands that an investigation over recent months carried out in Ireland and in Bermuda by legal advisers to the HSE has been unable to determine the beneficial owners of the company.

However, it is understood that Blackmore Group Assets Ltd informed the HSE legal advisers in early February that no persons or corporate entities resident or incorporated in the Republic of Ireland had any shareholding in the company either directly or indirectly through nominees.

It also maintained that no person connected with the HSE had any beneficial interest in the company.

The HSE investigation confirmed that Blackmore Group Assets Ltd was registered in the British Virgin Islands but that it did not have a physical presence there.

Legal advisers commissioned by the HSE in Bermuda reported that the company had been incorporated in the British Virgin Islands on February 25th, 2002.

The Bermuda law firm told the HSE that it was not required in the British Virgin Islands for the register of directors and members to be made public or to be filed at the corporate registry.

The law firm said that no such filing had been made and that it was not possible, from publicly available details in the British Virgin Islands, to discover who held shares in the company.

It emerged last December that the Revenue Commissioners had contacted the HSE’s office in Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim, seeking information and documentation about Blackmore Group Assets Ltd. However, it is understood that the HSE has received no further contact from the Revenue Commissioners.

A spokesman for Fine Gael said last night that a series of questions set out by party leader Enda Kenny last December remained unanswered. These included how a shelf company was awarded a €2 million contract.

Minister hasn't registered interest in $1m US property

Apparently the rules on declaring interests mean you don’t have to declare things like this…

Junior Minister Frank Fahey has not declared an interest in a $1m-valued US property on the Dail register of interests.

The property (equivalent to €0.83m) is held by a US company in which he is a shareholder.

Mr Fahey has declared interests in other properties held by the same company.

An Irish Independent inquiry has found the Junior Justice Minister has amassed a multi-million euro property empire across the globe in either his own name or in partnership with relatives or business associates.

Many of his 20-plus properties were purchased in the US, Europe and Ireland with his wife and a company called Sage Developments.

But the former teacher-turned-politician has not declared his interest in a €1m six-bedroom house in Massachusetts on the Dail register of interests.

Legal expert voices internet concerns

How will monitoring of communications be carried out in the future? TJ McIntye has legitimate concens:

…the chairman of Digital Rights Ireland, T J McIntyre, who has written to a number of Senators drawing attention to problems with the Criminal Justice (Mutual Assistance) Bill, currently before the Oireachtas.

Mr McIntyre said the Bill, which seeks to fit requests for assistance from other states into the existing Irish legal framework based on the 1993 Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act, is not sufficient.

He said the Act deals with an interception regime rooted in an era when we only had Telecom Éireann. While other licensed operators were added following deregulation, not all are covered.

“Webmail [ such as Gmail or Hotmail], Voice-over IP [ such as Skype] and Instant Messaging Services [ such as AOL Instant Messenger] would appear to fall into this category,” he said.

Another problem with the 1993 Act was that it covered the message being transmitted – not when it reached its destination, he added.

Messages that had been opened, and remained in e-mail inboxes, or voicemail messages, would appear not to be protected.

This situation appeared to breach an EU directive which requires the interception of citizens’ personal communications to be regulated by legislative measures “necessary, appropriate and proportionate within a democratic society”, he said.

McBrearty vows he will go to jail rather than testify

Frank McBrearty has warned that he will not be attending the Morris Tribunal, he will likely face the almost crazy prospect of being prosecuted by a Tribunal he helped set up.

“I’m prepared to go to jail. I’m not afraid of Michael McDowell or anything he might threaten me with,” Mr McBrearty Jnr told the Irish Independent from Florida, where he is on holiday.

“Me and my family have been the biggest victims of a miscarriage of justice in Ireland and have been treated like second-class citizens. Why should the Garda Commissioner and Minister for Justice have their legal fees covered while we don’t?

“The thing that hurts us most is that we have put an awful lot of effort to get a public enquiry into this scandal investigated in the first place,” he said.

The tribunal is due to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr McBrearty’s detention in Letterkenny garda station in December 1996.

He was filmed being pulled unconscious down corridors by gardai. He also allegedly signed a confession stating he had murdered cattle dealer Richie Barron. It is now accepted that Barron died as a result of a hit-and-run incident.

The hearings on the module are due to begin in July. Anyone who refuses to co-operate could face a possible €12,750 fine, up to two years in prison, or both.

“Look at the Rossport Five and the support they got,” Mr McBrearty said. “Think of the support we would get. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, but I have told Minister McDowell that I am prepared to go to prison.”

McDowell says gardai signalled non-co-operation with ombudsman

Once the Garda Ombudsman is established, will the Gardai cooperate with it? It seems like they may not.

In a statement Mr McDowell described how he met both the GRA and the AGSI in Dublin in February 2004 to discuss the commission among other matters.

He said he was told “in the clearest and most unambiguous terms” that they would oppose the use of gardaí by the commission to investigate complaints.

“I pointed out to them that such a course of action would make the ombudsman commission’s work impossible because it would entail the creation of a very large staff of investigators – running perhaps to hundreds – and that such a course would not be justifiable, especially in relation to complaints of a lower degree of seriousness.”

Mr McDowell said the unions held this position despite his warning, and they were now claiming this did not amount to a threat of non-co-operation.

“I am absolutely satisfied that the policy clearly enunciated at the meeting by those members present was intended to convey to me that the associations would oppose the involvement of members of An Garda Síochána in investigations to be carried out by the commission.”

New privacy law will clarify existing rights

It’s an important part of the constitution, and clarifying existing rights will be a good thing. But will it take into account online rights?

Ideally, the Minister would have liked to publish his defamation legislation first and then act later to turn the Murray report into law, but he accepted that there was no point pushing the matter.

The Cabinet has now decided that the recommendations included in the Murray report should be turned into the heads of a Bill – the main points – in two, or three weeks.

The timetable is not without ambition, since drafting such a piece of legislation – even in its abbreviated form – may prove no easy task for parliamentary draughtsmen. Though some observers suspect a major rift between the Minister and Fianna Fáil Ministers, the reality is more prosaic, since both sides are agreed on the destination.

Though some in Fianna Fáil might believe that extra privacy rights are on the way, that is not the case, since the legislation to come will bring greater clarity to rights already in existence under the European Court of Human Rights and the Irish Constitution.

Though they exist, the public is entirely unaware of them. A better-informed public, backed by a clearly-written piece of Irish law – could yet occasionally put manners on misbehaving journalists, and, perhaps, in the future prevent the publication of something that would have been better unpublished.

Gardai examine hundreds of phone records

Interesting to see how ‘official’ phone bugging is going..

Hundreds of private telephone records are being examined by the Garda Síochána every month, the Data Protection Commissioner said

Gardai currently are entitled to get access to the records during inquiries about any crime, regardless of its seriousness, said the commissioner, Billy Hawkes, who published his annual report yesterday.

An initial request for the records of one individual suspected of criminality can frequently provoke requests for the records of every individual listed on the suspect’s file, he added.

“Just make sure that you don’t ring the number of a major criminal by mistake, or you could find that your records are listed,” he told journalists yesterday, though he emphasised that there is no evidence that the gardaí were improperly using their powers.

The inspection of a citizen’s telephone records should not be the “first option, or a routine option” for the Garda.

Under proposed EU legislation, which is being opposed by Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, telephone records would have to be stored for between six months and two years in all EU member states, but they would be made available to police only during serious crime investigations.

€975 a day for payroll experts

The PPARS debacle rolls on:

Computer experts hired through a mystery offshore company to work on the failed PPARS payroll system for the health service were being paid up to €975 a day.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act show that consultants supplied by Blackmore Group Assets (BGAL) were receiving monthly payments that in some cases amounted to €30,000 — the average annual industrial wage in Ireland.

Nine people were contracted through BGAL and worked on the PPARS project from 2002 to 2004.

The same story was reported in the Examiner last year, after a probe by Fine Gael into Blackmore Group Assets.