Coveney's hacked phone was used to contact other foreign ministers
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Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney has said his phone was hacked in 2020 and other foreign ministers were contacted using his phone’s identity.
Mr Coveney has also written to the Foreign Affairs Committee rejecting strongly claims he misled members in evidence given by him earlier this week in relation to the appointment process for Katherine Zappone as a UN special envoy.
He brought phone hacking into the public domain when explaining why he regularly deleted text messages, insisting that he brought up the hacking issue because some people were wrongly suggesting he was attempting to hide his text conversations with the Tánaiste about the Zappone process.
“If I was trying to keep texts from the Tánaiste secret, I would not have been the one to tell the committee about those same texts,” he said.
He said it was already publicly known that his phone was compromised in 2020.
“What is not known is that some of my foreign minister colleagues across Europe were contacted using my phone’s identity as a front during that hacking incident,” he said.
“I believe the matter was dealt with swiftly and thoroughly by my department and the gardaí, from whom I take ongoing advice. As a result of this incident and others, I work on the basis that very few telecommunications are completely secure,” he added.
In a strident letter to the committee, seen by the , Mr Coveney has moved to clarify lingering concerns among committee members about testimony he gave to it earlier this week.
In his letter, he accepts the texts released on Wednesday by his party leader Leo Varadkar show the Tánaiste was aware of the special envoy position on July 19 (eight days before the Taoiseach found out) and that the process was near completion.
“However, I did not have the messages word for word in the committee hearing and was relying on memory. I was completely honest with members of the committee on this point,” he said.
Refuting any suggestion of misleading the committee, he said it was he who told the committee the Tánaiste had raised the upcoming Zappone appointment with him by text.
“This has been shown to be completely consistent with what the Tánaiste’s text messages show. What I did not know in the committee was why the Tánaiste had initiated this text conversation,” he said.
However, his other text messages with Katherine Zappone, also released by his office, reveal she had told him about the upcoming role in the Department of Foreign Affairs, which at that stage was near finalisation and close to being brought to cabinet.
“My recollection was, and still is, that the Tánaiste’s reason for texting me was that he was meeting Katherine Zappone and wanted to know what was going on. This is completely consistent with what I said in response to questions from committee members,” Mr Coveney wrote in his letter to chairman Charlie Flanagan.
Mr Coveney said he was writing because the suggestion has been made in media that he mislead the committee. “The committee’s own records, detailed above, show this is not the case and I completely reject such a suggestion,” he said.