Minister admits he cannot back up leaks claim

Minister of State for European Affairs Noel Treacy has said that he has no evidence to back up his claims that the identity of a person leaking material from the Mahon tribunal was well known.

Mr Treacy accepted at the tribunal yesterday that in a radio interview with Newstalk last month he had given the impression that it was well known that a known individual within the tribunal was constantly leaking information for political purposes.

However the Minister told the tribunal that he had no evidence to support this claim. He said that if he had given the impression that he was inferring that a member of the tribunal or of the staff had been deliberately leaking information, he regretted it.

"I have no evidence to say that I have any knowledge of any person in the tribunal leaking," he said.

Mr Treacy was ordered to appear before the Mahon tribunal yesterday as part of its investigation into the publication by The Irish Times of material relating to its investigations into payments made to the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

The Minister said that the radio interview in which he had made his remarks had taken place early in the morning.

He believed the interview was to deal with European issues. He was not expecting questions about the tribunal and payments to the Taoiseach.

Counsel for the tribunal Des O'Neill SC said that Mr Treacy had made a number of factual statements in his interview.

He asked what evidence Mr Treacy had to support his claims and suggested that he had been surmising, based on generalities.

"Yes, I would be surmising, based on what I would read in the media and what is the overwhelming view of the ordinary people talking and discussions in the populace, which says that there is constant leaking," Mr Treacy said.

He accepted that this would not explain his statement indicating that there was an identified source within the tribunal.

Mr Treacy said that he had no personal knowledge of who was leaking information and that he had never heard anyone's name.

Asked how, in such circumstances, the identity of the person could be well known, Mr Treacy said: "Well, the public perception is that it is well known but I do not know that and I regret having created a conclusion in the mindset that people think that anybody in the tribunal was leaking".

Mr Treacy also said that in his interview he was speaking about the tribunal in the broadest sense.

"Basically there have been a number of serious leaks over the years and there have been a number of investigations and I understand that nobody has yet identified the source of those leaks and based on that, it is reasonable to assume that somebody connected with the activities of the tribunal has leaked documents. That was a conclusion I made. If I described that as factual then I regret that situation," he said.

He accepted that there was a clear distinction between leaks from the tribunal itself and leaks of tribunal material.

However, he said that in his perception and in the public perception once documentation appeared in the media one would not be able to make that distinction.

"Once the information is there, it is there", he said.