Gardaí plan to question a man who illegally hacked into music mogul Louis Walsh's voicemail. The Vodafone employee is believed to have breached the Data Protection Act and now faces criminal charges after illegally accessing Walsh's phone.

A Vodafone spokeswoman confirmed the man in question had been fired from his post. "We can confirm we recently discovered that a retail employee of Vodafone was involved in an incident of alleged misuse of customer information in relation to voicemail."

Separately, Walsh is considering suing the company for breach of privacy.

PR guru Max Clifford, who also previously had his phone hacked, has advised Walsh not to sue Vodafone.

"It isn't really the fault of the phone company. Louis would be better advised to get a separate legal undertaking from the individual who hacked into his phone that whatever he might have seen or heard in voicemail he will keep to himself. When it happened to me, I reported the matter to the police. There was a big investigation and it was found that my phone was tapped. I got to the bottom of it and that's what Louis should do to put himself at ease from now on."

Speaking about the incident last week, Walsh said: "I knew nothing about it at all until the boss of the company contacted me. I was told an employee had hacked my phone.

"The last I heard, the matter was with gardaí and there would be a court case. What measures are in place to stop this happening? It makes me very wary of exchanging confidential information by phone and yet it's hard to avoid given the nature of this business."