Fine Gael TD Michelle Mulherin has said that none of the calls she made from her Dáil office to Kenya were personal.
The Co Mayo TD was responding to reports that she made calls totalling €2,000 to an individual mobile phone number in Kenya.
Speaking on RTÉ's Today with Sean O'Rourke, Ms Mulherin said she was not in a position to comment on the cost of the calls but emphasised that they were made in the course of her work.
Ms Mulherin said she was never contacted by the Oireachtas in relation to any problem with phone calls.
She said that, for the most part, the phone calls she made to Kenya related to a third party, who was a private citizen, who had been defamed in a newspaper article.
She confirmed that the person was Danson Kole, a friend who had previously helped in her election campaign.
When asked were all the phone calls to the same number, Ms Mulherin said that she did not know, adding she has asked the Ceann Comhairle to look into the situation.
Ms Mulherin said that if there is a problem she will have no problem paying or refunding money.
The calls were discovered as part of an investigation by RTÉ's Investigations Unit.
Read more from RTÉ's Investigations Unit here.
There are a lot more than €2,000 worth of calls to Kenyan mobile. Those are only the ones which made it on to the Top 100 lists #mulherin
— Ken Foxe (@kenfoxe) January 26, 2015Ms Mulherin said she had contacted the Ceann Comhairle and asked him to investigate the issue and was open to whatever he had to say about it, including the propriety of the calls.
She said she would like to get more information on the calls because currently all of the information was coming from the media.
The costs did seem expensive, she added.
Ms Mulherin questioned whether the controversy meant that the confidentiality, which is assured to the communications of TDs and Senators by the Constitution, was "gone by the wayside".
She said that she did not have a personal life and all her life was "taken up with politics", which did not leave her "the liberty of making long, lengthy personal phone calls out of Leinster House".
