Officer held in leak probe released
Trevor Sargent resigned as minister of state for food and horticulture
Friday March 19 2010
A garda officer arrested over the leaking of a letter that led to the resignation of former junior minister Trevor Sargent has been released without charge, the force has said.
The woman, in her early thirties, was arrested on Thursday for questioning about how correspondence from the former Green Party leader was passed to a newspaper.
She was held at Lucan Garda Station under section four of Criminal Justice Act before being released.
"A file is being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions," said a garda spokesman.
The revelations that Mr Sargent, a TD for Dublin North, wrote to a garda in 2008 asking for a public order prosecution against a constituent to be dropped forced him to stand down last month as minister of state for food and horticulture.
The garda officer arrested on Thursday was suspended pending the outcome of an investigation into the leaking of the correspondence to the Evening Herald. She was previously based at Balbriggan Garda Station but had moved to Garda Command and Control at Harcourt Square in central Dublin.
Under the Garda Siochana Act, an officer can face a 50,000 euro fine or up to five years in jail for disclosing confidential information.
Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy ordered an internal probe into how the information was leaked after a political storm about who was responsible.
Justice minister Dermot Ahern denied it was a tit-for-tat attack by Fianna Fail on their Green Party coalition partners after the resignation of defence minister Willie O'Dea.
The revelations about Mr Sargent emerged just days after Mr O'Dea was forced to resign under pressure from the Greens because he wrongly claimed a Sinn Fein councillor had links to a brothel, but denied the slur on a sworn High Court affidavit.
