Garda Síochána (Powers) Bill 2026: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-26
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Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin

We have gone back and forth on this a few times. If a Garda makes an application for a search warrant and makes the judge aware that there is a risk to journalistic privilege as part of that search warrant and at that point, the judge decides to go ahead with the search warrant and the gardaí carry out the screening assessment. Having insight and understanding regarding An Garda Síochána's protection of data rights over the years and data leaks, it is very concerning that the assessment of privilege would happen at that level. There is also the question of what Garda rank it happens at. Is it at a certain rank? Will there be a designated office that decides to search that? I am just imagining for a moment that I am a journalist. I have my laptop taken and on that laptop, I have several files. One file is called "Confidential sources", another file is called "Whistleblowers" and another file is called something else. A Garda or an authorised person under this Bill assessing whether or not that is relevant material now has information on confidential sources for various different cases. They could have been confidential sources or a Garda whistleblower. Imagine if somebody came across that information. Confidential sources are confidential for a reason so even if there is a threshold set around what can be considered relevant, there is a risk with regard to the volume of data that could be seen by gardaí as part of that risk assessment and how that is a held and handled. If it is a USB key they have to plug that into their internal system to assess its relevance, what happens to that data? Do they have so many days to delete all that data? How do we know they delete all that data? Do they hold on to files and files that are unrelated? It is hard for me to understand. We want to ensure that there is legislation to protect that journalistic privilege where I understand there are grey areas and it is not absolute and all those conversations but what is really scary to me is the thought of gardaí just having access to files upon files upon files and going "Okay, they're under journalistic privilege" and then handing them back. They will still have seen them. There are people who might have divulged high levels of abuse or neglect and gardaí actually will have access to this. Whatever about protecting one confidential source, we are actually exposing many other confidential sources in the effort to do a screening access. I am still finding it hard to understand how that data is treated, handled, minded and protected during the screening process because we are going to expose many things to the eye of An Garda Síochána that have nothing to do with the warrant.
Definitions bring us back into what is a very wide sweep. Senator McDowell referred to the other stop-and-search powers. Regarding asserting journalistic privilege when a garda already has a search warrant, gardaí arrived at a community project a few weeks back and said they had a search warrant. Those in the community project had no idea why they were there. They asked why and whether they could come back because there were people there receiving confidential services from the project. The gardaí did not care about the anonymity of the people availing of an addiction service in that moment. These were people in very vulnerable positions. No crime had taken place on the site, no call had previously been made, and the gardaí just said they had the search warrant, this was what it said and they were coming in and taking the camera, and they wanted that camera because it might have picked up something somewhere else. They did not pay any heed to the fact that there were people in there receiving care. Without detailing what the process of screening is, the rank of Garda and how it is held, it is really concerning. What we are going to see is a huge amount of secrecy and silence where people become incredibly terrified to share any sort of information with a journalist, especially like when we look at the North, which has inter parte s, as mentioned by Senator Sarah O'Reilly. We do not even allow for the journalist in question to be able to be in the court to make the case at that level and for the screening to happen then before the search warrant so for me screening is a serious issue. Even though the Minister is referencing all the other parts, I still have a scenario in my head involving a garda of whatever rank with a rake of information. Regardless of whether that is determined relevant or is under journalistic privilege, that Garda has still seen it, still has it and still has all those confidential sources. Whether the Garda can use them is another thing.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-26