Deputy Seán Dunne gave notice he would raise the issue of warrants by the Minister for Justice authorising the tapping of telephones for the purpose of listening in on private conversations.
Adjournment Debate. - Tapping of Telephones.
I want to state as a definite provable fact that the Minister for Justice, in authorising warrants for the tapping of telephones of private citizens, acted without legal authority, has abrogated the Constitution, has invaded the privacy of the home which is the citizen's most precious possession and, in short, has affronted the ordinary decencies which make life possible.
Early this morning I gave notice of my intention to raise this vital matter which concerns the essential liberty of the citizen, the right of the citizen to conduct his conversations, whether they relate to social or business matters, in the strictest secrecy, a right which is guaranteed to him by the Constitution and which has been taken from him, in effect, by the Minister for Justice.
In the course of the day I asked a question of the Minister as to where he got his authority for this reprehensible act of tapping private telephones and his reply is interesting inasmuch as it is an obvious effort to put a face on something which does not bear examination at all. The reply given today has no relevance to telephone tapping whatsoever. I asked the Minister by what legal authority he was empowered to authorise the tapping of telephones and he said:
I would refer the Deputy to section 56 of the Post Office Act, 1908, as to which an Adaptation Order was made by the President of the Executive Council on 19th July, 1926, under subsection (2) of section 11 of the adaptation of Enactments Act, 1922, determining that the Minister for Justice is the appropriate Minister to exercise this function of issuing postal warrants.
Postal warrants, and if you go down through the rest of the reply you will find no reference whatever to the practice of the tapping of telephones. Let us examine what this reply actually means. I have gone to the part of this House where these statutes are to be found. I have here the British Act upon which the Minister bases his alleged authority, a nonexistent right, the Public General Acts, Edward VII, 1908. The Minister referred me to section 56 of the Post Office Act, 1908, and I take it that subsection (2) of section 56 is the one which he claims is relevant. The subsection reads:
Provided that nothing in this section shall extend to the opening, detaining, or delaying of a postal packet, returned for want of a true direction, or returned by reason that the person to whom the same is directed is dead or cannot be found, or shall have refused the same, or shall have refused or neglected to pay the postage thereof, or to the opening or detaining or delaying of a postal packet under the authority of this Act or in obedience to an express warrant in writing made under the hand of a Secretary of State: Provided that the warrant in Scotland may be either under the hand of a Secretary of State ... in Ireland shall be under the hand and seal of the Lord Lieutenant....
Postal packets, not one word of telephones. Let us have a look at the definitions. The definition of a postal packet is to be found on page 227 of this volume which contains the Post Office Act of 1908. I quote:
The expression "postal packet" means a letter, post card, newspaper, book packet, pattern or sample packet, or parcel and every packet or article transmissible by post, and includes a telegram.
That is all. It is on this the Minister bases his reply of today, in other words, a patent and obvious admission that there is no legal power whatever to enable him to do this thing which he has admitted doing in what he claims to have been the pursuit of those allegedly responsible for or suspected of being guilty of what he himself apparently has the right to define as serious crime. Article 40 of section 5 of the Constitution states specifically that the dwelling of every citizen is inviolable. I take it that must mean that no person, no authority, has the right to invade the privacy of any man's home. But the Minister has, on his own admission, done so by tapping telephones which, we take it at any rate, lead to private homes.
In the course of a question asked last week by Deputy Barrett of Cork, I made inquiry of the Minister about this business because I could not really believe that it was going on. I sought his affirmation that it was. He did so affirm, but he added a remark which he did not repeat today and which betrayed an extraordinary attitude of mind towards the rights of the citizen. He said: "An innocent person has nothing to fear." That, to my mind, is a spurious dictum used in an attempt to justify a palpable wrong. Who is to decide who is an innocent person? Have we not machinery established over the years, namely, the courts of law and justice, to determine who are innocent and who are guilty people? Is it not an impertinence on the part of anybody to assume to himself the right to determine who is an innocent person and who is a guilty one? Only the courts have that right.
Suppose for a moment we accept this spurious idea, that there does reside some right in any quarter of Government to eavesdrop on conversations between citizens because someone suspects they are guilty of something. Suppose we accept that, where will it end? Does it not follow that you must winnow the whole population and listen in on every subscriber in the country in order to determine who is innocent and who is guilty? Is not that the logical end to this kind of invasion of rights?
I am concerned about the principle of the liberty of the citizen in this matter. I do not think any Minister of State should have the right to do this. I do not think the people of this country would consciously invest any Minister of State with that right. I think they are just as indignant about it as I am, and as any ordinary person would be. Consider the possible abuses inherent in it. Consider for a moment a situation arising where we had holding the high office of Minister for Justice a person of little or no scruples. Such a thing is not impossible. A democratic system very often produces rather peculiar end results. Such a thing is not inconceivable.
Imagine for a moment just how this power could be used if such a person held that office. Where would his phone tapping activities end? In defence of his activities, the Minister has said it is done only in the detection of serious crime. What is serious crime? Who defines serious crime? Is it not possible that if such a person as I have described were in office, he could easily regard his political opponents' valid opposition as serious crime? In fact, have we not seen stride across the stage of Irish politics and history such people who were so intolerant of the views of their opponents that in their hearts they thought their opponents were criminals? Such people were not loath—or a bit behind the door— so to describe them even when it was obvious that those descriptions were totally unjustified.
These days the papers are full of discussions on this problem in many countries. I recall reading that the Supreme Court of America decided that evidence taken by this undesirable and deplorable method was not admissible in a court of law. From what we have observed of the American courts of law, even at this remove, one would have thought that practically anything was possible, in some of them anyway. Even there they will not accept this kind of evidence.
We never use it as evidence.
Why do you do it?
Of course you do.
Never.
What use is it?
You may not use it in a court of law, but it is used covertly as evidence.
You were talking about the courts.
I was talking about the American courts, but I should have imagined we would have a higher standard in certain respects than some levels of American jurisprudence.
Today we read about the West German Government being highly concerned about the continuation of this practice which arose during the occupation, and was justified by reference to the unsettled conditions which obtained in Europe. In Finland and Sweden it has raised a storm of controversy, a storm of protest from the ordinary people who feel threatened by it, as they should. Everywhere men cherish the principle of liberty it has been looked upon as a most undesirable thing and a grave and positive danger and threat, no matter how carefully exercised, and no matter how carefully operated, to the liberty and privacy of the citizen.
I read in the Sunday Telegraph of 19th April, 1964:
I understand that a special room in the trunk telephone headquarters at Crown Alley has been allocated for this work, now a regular task for the detective force. The central Dublin exchanges have also made regular arrangements for listening-in.
I do not know whether the Minister is aware—but I am—that there is abroad in this country, and certainly in the city, a widespread conviction that there is large-scale telephone tapping.
It is not true.
The Minister says it is not true. The best thing the Minister could do is divest himself of this power which he does not rightly have, which he has assumed. Perhaps it may be said that it was assumed by others who went before him. I am not concerned with that. The first time it was brought vividly to my notice was when this particular question was brought up in the House. I did not think that in this country of ours, where we are trying to fashion forms of democracy suitable to our own people, there could be what I can only describe as "flyboy gim-mickry" operated in the background, unseen and unknown to the population.
I now call for a stop—a complete stop—to this, because whatever alleged benefits the Minister may argue flows from it, they are microscopic compared with the damage and danger caused by the abrogation of the principle of privacy as between citizens in conversation, whether by telephone or otherwise.
This business of telephone tapping seems to me to be the parliamentary equivalent of the Loch Ness monster in journalism. It rears its ugly head any time there is a political doldrum to be filled. It undulates on the surface for a moment or two, and then disappears into the depths, until some politician feels it incumbent upon him to haul it up again.
This experience is not peculiar to this country. Deputies will have seen that the matter has been raised in Germany recently, and in Norway; and in Britain, also, it seems to arise from time to time. Indeed, I am told also that apparently not wishing to be out-done in the scramble for publicity, one of those pseudo-liberals, who seem to regard Telefís Éireann as nothing more than a medium through which they may inflict their half-baked views on the rest of us, sought to air his views about it, and of course gave a distorted picture in the process of doing so.
I wish the Labour Party and all those fringe elements would make up their minds and let me know clearly where they stand in matters of this sort. One day they pretend to be enormously perturbed at lawlessness, vice, unsolved crimes, and so on. They berate me and the Garda Síochána for not doing better in stamping out this or that particular evil. Then, as soon as we take positive action in one direction or another to deal with any given situation, they suddenly discover that they have the most tender consciences and they weep for the poor unfortunate criminal on whom the Gardaí are using unfair practices and devices in order to apprehend him.
That is not true.
We are dealing here only with criminals. Law-abiding citizens are outside the scope of this debate entirely. It is only where the Garda Síochána, as a responsible institution in this country, are satisfied that a person is actually engaged in some serious criminal activity that this question arises at all.
I had not the privilege of being a member of this House when Deputy Seán Dunne's colleague, Deputy Everett, was Minister for Justice or, indeed, when he was Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, the other Department vitally concerned in this matter. Apparently, it never dawned on the innocent Deputy S. Dunne to raise the matter at that time.
I never heard of it.
Nonsense. It has been raised in this Parliament down through the years.
I never heard of it. It was never raised in this House in my time here and I have been here 13 years.
This is perennial. It is the Lough Ness monster of politics.
The Minister is trying to make it so but it is a bit more serious than that.
Deputy Corish, who was actually a Cabinet colleague of Deputy Everett, talked here last week about Gestapo methods. Did he ever find time, I wonder, to talk to his Cabinet colleague about this practice and to persuade him how reprehensible it was—or was he so gloriously innocent and unaware of the fact that it was taking place? I want to say that there is no such thing in this country—and I am happy to be able to say it in defence of my predecessors in office of all Parties—as widespread or indiscriminate interception of telephone conversations. This device is resorted to only in cases where either subversive organisations or organised criminal conspiracies are involved and where the information concerned can be shown to be obtainable in no other way.
I know that many innocent people from time to time imagine that their telephones are tapped because they hear all sorts of clicking noises or background noises of one sort or another. These background noises exist in every telephone system in the world. Indeed, I am sure they are responsible for a great deal of the misapprehension there is about this particular matter. They are due, I am told, to a variety of causes—faults in switchboards, faults in junction boxes, faults in cables, close proximity to high voltage equipment, vibrations in buildings caused by traffic and the temporary dislocation of lines for one reason or another.
The Post Office engineers say that all that can be hoped for at any time in any system is that the subscriber will have a reasonably clear line. So, for Heaven's sake, let me say to Deputies that the next time they hear one of these background noises they should not imagine that somebody from the Department of Justice is listening to their every word. It is probably, I suggest, due to nothing more sinister than that some unfortunate earwig has come to an untimely end in a junction box.
"Earwig" is well chosen.
It is very apt.
As Germany has been mentioned, I recall that when the former Chancellor, Dr. Adenauer, was being pressed by Opposition Deputies in the German Parliament on this matter—I am sure, for this very reason—he suggested that he himself had often been under the impression that his telephone was being tapped.
I would say there are similar examples of that in this country, too, even at that level.
The interests of the general public and their fundamental right to privacy are fully safeguarded in this matter. No telephone conversation can be intercepted except under the authority of a warrant signed and sealed by the Minister for Justice and these warrants can be issued only in a very limited category of cases—the types of cases I have outlined, namely, serious criminal activities or the activities of subversive organisations.
There is no power for it. I should like the Minister to answer that point.
I did not interrupt the Deputy when he was speaking. I shall also deal with that. I want to make this point to the House. The Minister for Justice cannot initiate this procedure. He cannot, in regard to any telephone, start the process. He can act only when a written request comes to him from the responsible authority and when he is satisfied and when his Departmental advisers are satisfied that the information concerned can be obtained in no other way. Therefore, there is no question at any stage—as the Deputy tried to suggest —of some unscrupulous Minister for Justice abusing this power.
Who are the responsible authorities advising the Minister in these matters—the Garda, I take it?
The request must come from the Commissioner of the Garda Síochána or a Deputy Commissioner. My advisers are my Departmental officials. The connivance of a whole group of people would have to be available before there could be the slightest possible abuse of this power.
Would the Minister tell the House——
I will not be cross-examined. This is a very important matter.
There are only a couple of minutes left and the Minister is entitled to them.
I want to assure the House that the very limited number of warrants issued in the limited category of cases is regularly and at short intervals reviewed by me as Minister for Justice and the necessity for their continuance in operation must be justified to me. I am continually reviewing the list and striking off any for which there is no justification.
The Commissioner and the Garda Síochána carry an enormous responsibility. Day in and day out the Commissioner and the Force are responsible for the safety and security of this State and for the protection of the lives and property of all of us. This is a task from which there is no respite. Every day, there is some new development, some new menace to be met. We must, as a Parliament and as a Government, within the limits of democratic freedom, give them every assistance possible to carry out their task and discharge their responsibility to the community. They do not wish, nor would this Government permit them, to interfere with the liberty of any individual or hinder him from going about his lawful affairs as a free citizen. On the other hand, we are not prepared to frustrate them in their fight against organised crime or to deny them the use of this perfectly legitimate device in that fight — a device which is permitted in every other country of the world that I know of, many of which are just as passionately devoted to individual liberty and democratic freedom as we are.
I want to quote from The Irish Law Times of 6th December, 1958. It says:
The fact that private armies, fifth columnists and other underground subversive associations can and do exist—and indeed flourish—in the modern State, makes it imperative for the State to take all necessary steps for its own protection. To grant immunity, or almost complete immunity, from interception of messages must have the effect of opening wide the door to danger and invite disaster by exposing the State—and, indeed, other States also—together with the inhabitants to whatever villainy conspirators choose to design.
The opening of letters and the overhearing of telephone conversations seem to be an absurdly trifiingly small price to pay for the continued peace and welfare of the nation and Commonwealth.
Some years ago the British Government appointed a Committee of Privy Councillors to inquire into this matter. That Committee had no hesitation whatever in recommending the retention of this power. I quote the various conclusions and recommendations. Paragraph 158 reads:
We are satisfied that interception has proved effective in the detection of major crimes, customs frauds and dangers to the security of the State.
Paragraph 165 states:
It would be against the public interest for the Secretary of State to give figures of the extent of the interception in communications, for the reasons set out.
Paragraph 168 states:
We recommend that the powers of interception should continue to be used subject to the conditions and safeguards we have set out in Part III and in this summary of conclusions, but that there should be no extension beyond those we have so carefully defined.
That Committee, I suggest, of Privy Councillors in Great Britain was just as concerned with the liberty of the individual and the democratic rights of the citizen as Deputy S. Dunne.
I want to give this House a most solemn assurance, as Minister for Justice, that this practice is resorted to only where the Garda are satisfied beyond any shadow of doubt that the persons concerned are actually involved in or about to engage in serious crime and that the information they require about that crime can be obtained in no other way. The telephone system, after all, is a service provided by the State for the people. I want to ask Deputies if they think it is right that these people should be able to use it freely and without hindrance in furtherance of their criminal activities.
Does Deputy S. Dunne want to make the job of criminals easier? Does he want to facilitate them in their work?
That is rhetoric.
Who decides that they are criminals?
The Garda satisfy themselves——
They decide they are guilty?
Not that they are guilty——
That is what the Minister said.
I am glad this matter has been raised in public. It gives me an opportunity of bringing home to those engaged in serious crime—and I am not going behind the door about this—that they cannot use our telephone system with impunity for their nefarious activities. If I can succeed, by saying that here publicly, in curbing their activities, I shall be very happy.
I know that some law-abiding citizens do worry from time to time that their telephone may be tapped. I am happy to have this opportunity of saying to every member of the general public who uses a telephone that unless one is actually known to us to be engaged in serious crime of one sort or another, we have no interest whatever in his telephone conversations.
Does that include the Irish Congress of Trade Unions?
There is no possibility whatever of their calls being intercepted by us——
Will the Minister categorically deny that there was phone tapping in relation to calls made in recent months by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions?
Nonsense. Do not be absurd.
The Minister is side-stepping. The Minister has not answered my point in regard to the illegality of the practice.
The Minister did not reply to the statement made by Deputy S. Dunne that he had in fact no legal powers for the carrying on of this practice; that the Act on which he based his case refers to postal packets only, and that there is no reference in that Act to telephones or telephone tapping, as such.
The Dáil adjourned at 5.35 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Tuesday, 28th April, 1964.