Departmental Communications

Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 16 January 2018

Tuesday, 16 January 2018

Questions (1253)

Catherine Murphy

Question:

1253. Deputy Catherine Murphy asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if his Department uses anti-profanity software on its email systems and online contact forms; if so, the level of human oversight that is applied to the monitoring of this software and its effectiveness; his views on whether persons' legitimate right to petition Government may be blocked unintentionally by errors in the use of such software in determining that which qualifies as profanity being communicated in email and/or online contact forms; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2078/18]

Written answers

Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine

As a large public sector organisation this Department receives circa 170,000 external emails per week and therefore uses filtering software to block dangerous and malicious emails. As part of and in line with the Department’s ISO 27001 Information Security certification procedures, the Department uses dictionaries of profanity terms provided by our email gateway software vendor to quarantine emails containing certain terms. These emails will be kept in quarantine for 90 days and can be released to the intended recipient on request. No profanity filtering is in place on the ‘‘Contact Us’’ page on the Department’s website www.agriculture.gov.ie.