A member of the Naval Service has been jailed for three months for disclosing information without authority about the movements of State ships at sea.
A court martial also dismissed 24-year-old former Able Seaman Eoin Gray from the Defence Forces.
He will serve his sentence at the military detention centre at The Curragh.
At the start of this court martial yesterday, Gray faced five charges. One of them included conspiracy to aid people unknown to import cocaine in December 2008.
However, four of the charges were dropped when he changed his plea and admitted disclosing information about the movement of State ships at sea.
Commander Patrick Burke told the court martial yesterday that Gray contacted a colleague in the fisheries monitoring centre at Haulbowline on a number of occasions to find out the exact location and status of the naval ship, LÉ Orla, on which he worked.
Gray said he wanted to be free for the weekend to go home and he then texted the information to his girlfriend.
This morning, Commandant Paul Logan of the Defence Forces Catering College said that Gray has been on a chef training course for the past few months where he has been an excellent student and 'gave no trouble'.
Defence barrister Ross Maguire said the charges that Gray pleaded not guilty to yesterday were very serious. He said nothing could be more serious for a member of the Defence Forces than to be complicit in the importation of illegal drugs.
Mr Maguire said Gray's plea of guilty to one offence of texting his girlfriend about his desire to go home for the weekend means that everything else is irrelevant. He said this point was accepted by the Director of Military Prosecutions.
Mr Maguire said there was nothing sinister about Gray’s private text to his girlfriend.
However, the judge, Colonel Tony McCourt, said Gray could not have been unaware about the sensitive nature of ships' information.
He said Gray could not now be trusted with information of a sensitive nature and said he had betrayed trust and confidence and had failed to maintain standards of discipline.
Colonel McCourt said he understood Gray's wish to inform his girlfriend about when he was off duty, but he had gone way beyond that.
The judge said that arranging Gray's off-duty social life did not entitle him to give information about ships at sea.
The Colonel said he wanted to lay down a clear statement that breaches of discipline cannot and will not be accepted.
However, he said no evidence was given to the court that the information from Gray's text had any adverse impact on operations.
Imposing the three-month sentence, Colonel McCourt said he had taken into consideration mitigating factors, such as the guilty plea and Gray being the father a two-year-old child.
