LEO VARADKAR’S staff have been trying to access websites with inappropriate material in the last month - including porn sites.
Their attempts were blocked by their department’s strict firewall, but the category of sites that they were trying to access has been revealed by the Irish Examiner.
Websites related to gambling, gaming and alcohol made up the majority of blocked searches, but there were even some unsuccessful attempts to access pornographic sites too.
Between July 6 and July 30, over 500,000 attempts to get on to restricted sites were blocked - despite the fact that staff at the Department An Taoiseach have been warned that their computers are provided for ‘business purposes’ only.
The records reveal that blocked sites include:
- Five seperate attempts to access pornography
- 15 attempts to access dating sites
- 11 attempts to access “other adult material
- 10 attempts to access lingerie and swimwear
- 99 attempts to access alcohol-related sites
- 39 attempts to access tobacco-related sites
- 448 attempts to access gambling sites
- 15,638 hits related to gaming
While there have been clear breaches to their rules about appropriate searches, the department said many legitimate websites include advertising material within their webpages which may have contributed to the bloated numbers.
“Often it is the computers themselves which make the request to a website/web service rather than a person interacting with the computer,” the department said.
“This would be particularly true of many software update services and would account for a significant proportion [94%] of the results associated with the ‘games’ category, which includes update services provided by Microsoft, Intel, and others in relation to their products.”
Hmm, still doesn’t excuse the porn searches, though. Seriously, at the office??
