THE FORMER Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, has joined in the demands for a Dail inquiry into the tapping of the telephone of the journalist Vincent Browne. The Fianna Fail leader, Mr Bertie Ahern, said yesterday that he would have no objection to such an inquiry.
Meanwhile Mr Browne has defended his decision of June 1995 to accept a private settlement of £91,000 of his legal action against the State arising from the tapping of his telephone from February 1975 to February 1983. The settlement provided for its disclosure in an agreed statement, but in the event the State and Mr Browne could not agree on a wording.
Mr Browne's account of these events is given in his weekly column published today in this newspaper.
He told The Irish Times yesterday that he had decided not to proceed with his legal action because of the risk of losing, the cost of pursuing the case and a bogus threat that there was embarrassing material in the transcripts of his telephone conversations which were in the possession of the State.
His legal advisers had warned at the time that it was not clear that the tapping of his telephone was illegal. If it was tapped exclusively for the purpose of gathering information about subversion, it was arguably legal and he would lose the case, he was advised.
"Now that I know what I know it is inconceivable that 1 would have lost, and would probably have been awarded more than I got," he said yesterday. This is because just four of the 85 phone conversations, transcripts of which he had seen, were with people who could be viewed as subversive, and even these did not contain useful information on subversive activity.
A further factor in his decision to agree to a settlement was the fact that his lawyers wanted to be paid some money "up front" before proceeding further with the case. He did not have the funds to pay for such a case, he said.
In addition, he said, "the State indicated that some of the material in the transcripts would be embarrassing to me and would show some legal impropriety on my part. This turned out to be a bogus threat. But when I was trying to think of conversations that occurred up to 20 years previously over an eight-year period I couldn't be sure - other than that I knew that I wasn't engaged in crime or subversion - what was in them that could be represented in an unfavourable light".
Dr FitzGerald said yesterday that he had become aware as Taoiseach (in 1981-82) that Mr Browne's telephone was being tapped. "But because of the fact that he had been in contact with the IRA journalistically it seemed to me that if useful information could be picked up then it was appropriate as long as the process was used only for that purpose."
But what had now emerged was very serious, he said on RTE's Morning Ireland programme yesterday. "Conversations which had nothing to do with subversion were transcribed and kept . .. It looks as if there was direct contact between someone in the gardai and the Minister, by-passing the Department of Justice.
"The Dail and the public are entitled to know what happened when there is now clear evidence of abuse and a cover-up extending over a very long period of years."