Taping of prisoner calls rises to 139 cases

The scale of the inadvertent recording of phone calls made by prisoners to solicitors grew even as Taoiseach Enda Kenny was informing the Dáil of the latest eavesdropping controversy to hit Government.

Mr Kenny told the Dáil yesterday afternoon that some 84 prisoners had been affected but hours later, when the Irish Prison Service issued a full statement, that figure had grown to 139 inmates, and may increase further.

Those affected had made 1,749 calls to solicitors that were accidentally recorded even though they were entitled to confidentiality.

The prison service has said 81 of those calls had been played back by prison staff, though the recordings have been inaccessible to staff since the service took remedial action in recent days.

The prison service has insisted at no time were the calls ever accessed by the Garda, which will allay concerns that the content of the calls may have been used to aid prosecutions that may have been challenged as a result. The issue of calls to solicitors being inadvertently recorded in prisons came to light last November when staff discovered two cases. Those two prisoners were not recorded again.

“The scale of this problem was not appreciated at that time and it was intended to deal with the issue by way of a future amendment to the prisoner phone system,” the Irish Prison Service statement said.

The much large number of prisoners' calls now known to have been inadvertently intercepted were recorded by a system installed in July 2010 when the current secretary general of the Department of Justice Brian Purcell headed the Irish Prison Service.

Mr Purcell is also at the centre of the political controversy surrounding the 16-day gap between his office receiving a warning letter from former Garda commissioner Martin Callinan about recording of calls in stations and Mr Shatter receiving the letter.

The delay occurred despite Mr Callinan requesting the letter be brought to Mr Shatter’s attention. Mr Purcell was on bereavement leave from March 15th to 24th. However, that still left Mr Purcell from March 10th to 15th to bring the correspondence to Mr Shatter’s attention.

When asked yesterday if Mr Purcell still enjoyed Mr Shatter’s full confidence, a spokeswoman for the Minister said: “Yes, the Minister has full confidence in Brian Purcell.”

In light of the Garda station recording controversy that the director general of the Prison Service Michael Donnellan requested last Wednesday that his information technology staff run a check.

All calls made by prisoners from State jails are recorded, except for those to their lawyers and the Samaritans. There are dedicated channels for those calls.

Prisoners tell the authorities who their solicitors are so the private line can be used but some prisoners had more than one solicitor and it was calls to theses second lawyers that were recorded.

By last Friday the review had identified 84 prisoners, which has since grown to 139 and 1,749 contentious calls.