Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (10 page)

No Comhairle Dáil Ceantair document was ever produced to the tribunal in which the constituency organisation recorded the existence of the
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account in the 1990s. In 1995 the ‘rainbow’ Government, headed by John Bruton of Fine Gael, introduced legislation that established new controls over political fund-raising. One of the stipulations was that each constituency organisation had to nominate an account into which all political donations were deposited. It also had to nominate a party officer who would liaise with a newly established Standards in Public Office Commission in relation to the operation of the account. The lodgements to the
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account ceased with the coming into effect of the new legislation in 1995, and the account remained untouched until 2008 and its discovery by the tribunal.

In 1995 the address on the
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account was changed to Collins’s home address in Malahide from the ‘care of the branch’ address that had previously been in use. Ahern said that in about 1995 or 1996 Collins began to suffer health problems and withdrew from much of his work connected with St Luke’s. He said responsibility for the
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account was taken over by a new Comhairle Dáil Ceantair officer, Dominic Dillane, but he later amended this evidence when Dillane brought it to his attention that he had not joined Fianna Fáil until 1999. Ahern gave no evidence about who he believed was in charge of the
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account on behalf of the constituency organisation from 1995 to 1999. Dillane told the tribunal that he had learnt of the account on being appointed Comhairle Dáil Ceantair treasurer a year or so after joining the party. He became active with the party after he had met Royston Brady when the latter was canvassing for it. Brady believes that Ahern selected Dillane to be constituency treasurer precisely because he had no personal knowledge of matters that occurred before his becoming involved with the party. Information discreetly disclosed by Brady to reporters during the Ahern payments crisis had come from Dillane to Brady years earlier, according to Brady, who sometimes socialised with Dillane. In 2003 Dillane was appointed a director of Fáilte Ireland, the state tourism board.

At the time of Ahern’s appearance before the tribunal the balance in the
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account, which had not been touched since 1995, was €47,803.52. Ahern said the purpose of the
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account was to hold money so that it would be available if it was needed for work on St Luke’s. In fact up to €200,000 had been spent on the renovation and maintenance of St Luke’s since it was purchased in 1987, but none of it had come from the
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account. Most of the lodgements were large, round-figure amounts, including lodgements of £5,000 every January between 1993 and 1995. Ahern was questioned about these during his February appearances.

As we have seen, the tribunal had sought a written explanation from Ahern on 30 November 2007 about the lodgements and withdrawals on the
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account. As Judge Mahon explained to Ahern’s counsel during the February sittings, because the tribunal had not received the answers it had sought by way of correspondence, it decided to seek them by the direct questioning of Ahern in the witness box. The chairperson said the tribunal had warned Ahern before his appearances in the witness box in late December that it might ask him about the
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account.

Where information is not furnished to the tribunal in a timely fashion, it often necessitates the convening of a public sitting of the tribunal to obtain such information by way of sworn evidence before the tribunal.

As Mr Ahern was scheduled to give evidence on 20th and 21st December 2007, he was notified of the fact that the tribunal intended to take his sworn evidence in relation to this issue. Furthermore, Mr Ahern was notified of the fact that should his evidence fail to be completed, he would be questioned on this issue when he returned to give evidence to the tribunal.

It is now 22nd February 2008, almost three months since the tribunal’s initial request for information concerning the then named
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account. Accordingly the tribunal does not believe that it is in any way premature to conduct public hearings for the purposes of taking Mr Ahern’s sworn evidence in relation to this account.

Ahern was able to give explanations for most of the lodgements and withdrawals on the
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account when O’Neill asked about them. He said the lodgements, bar one, were political donations or funds raised by golf classics. The withdrawals were expenses relating to his constituency operation. One withdrawal, of £20,000 in cash, arose from a decision to get some work done on St Luke’s. Subsequently a decision was made not to go ahead with the work, he said, and a short time later the £20,000 in cash was relodged.

The cheque of 30 March 1993 to the solicitor Patrick O’Sullivan was a decision of the house committee, he said, to give a loan to a member of staff. Three elderly relatives of the staff member were afraid that the house in which they had been living for a long period was going to be sold. They had tenancy rights but were afraid that a new owner would move other tenants in to live with them. The loan was advanced to the staff member so that the house could be purchased. There was no charge on the house, Ahern said. Asked when the loan had to be repaid, he said, ‘That was worked out with the officers, but in fact it hadn’t got to be repaid for a period; but the individuals opted to pay it back, and they have.’ Asked when, he said, ‘In recent times, certainly not years. In the recent past. Weeks or months, but recently.’ He agreed it was in the period since the tribunal had first queried the matter.

On the second of Ahern’s February appearances O’Neill said it had been expected that he would produce certain documents by 10 a.m. but that this had not happened. Rather, a letter had been received from Ahern’s solicitor, Liam Guidera, at 9:30 a.m. informing the tribunal that the documents were the property of the Fianna Fáil constituency organisation, not of Ahern. The letter also suggested that the matter of the
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account should not be pursued in public hearings for the time being.

My client has passed on to the constituency officers his exhortation that the requests of the tribunal be complied with if possible. However I understand that the constituency officers wish to consult with their legal representatives in that regard. It is hoped that this will not delay matters unduly. However in the circumstances I must reiterate the observations by Mr Maguire senior counsel [for Ahern] that these are matters which are the subject of an ongoing and unfinished private inquiry. It would be far more sensible to attempt to address the tribunal’s queries by way of correspondence and private interview in the first instance, rather than by way of what we consider will transpire to be an unnecessary public hearing.

When Ahern said he understood that the constituency officers would consult their solicitor, and in time make the documents available, O’Neill asked, ‘On what basis is that understanding founded, Mr Ahern?’

Ahern said he had briefly met a number of the senior officers of the constituency the previous night and told them they should work to make the data being sought by the tribunal available as soon as possible. ‘And they, as I understand it, they are meeting their own solicitor, and they are working to make that data available.’

Ahern said he had no new documents in his possession.

They have told me that they are going to give all of the information that we’ve gathered over the last few weeks. And they want to discuss that with their solicitor. And they are going to get it to the tribunal as quickly as they can. And that’s what they are endeavouring to do . . . They are preparing those documents, but they have been advised that those documents must go to their own solicitor before they can come to the tribunal. That’s what they informed me.

He said the constituency officers declined to give the documents to him for this reason. ‘I don’t think that they have any other difficulty,’ he said.

The tribunal had received a letter from another solicitor, Hugh Millar, before the sitting. Millar also asked that matters relating to the
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account not be aired in public that day, because the issue had still to be properly canvassed in private. Nevertheless, the hearing went ahead.

Ahern told O’Neill that when he got the letter of 30 November 2007 from the tribunal concerning the Davy cheque it had been immediately apparent that the Irish Permanent account, into which the £5,000 cheque had been lodged, was the
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account. He said he had not been able to contact Tim Collins ‘because he was in the United States.’ Ahern got in touch with the Drumcondra branch of the Irish Permanent, seeking details on the account, but the manager—who called over to St Luke’s, having been asked to do so by Ahern’s secretary, Sandra Cullagh—said he would need formal instructions from the account-holder. Ahern said he then asked Joe Burke to take up the matter, because Burke was the ‘chairman of the house committee’. He said he might not have told his solicitors about the
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account, since he was getting ready for his appearances at the tribunal on 21 and 22 December.

When O’Neill put it to Ahern that the Irish Permanent manager would not give him details on the
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account because it had ‘none of the indices of being a Fianna Fáil account,’ Ahern disagreed. When O’Neill said Burke was not given the information because he was not a signatory on the account, and did not have access to any documents on the account (despite being, as Ahern had said, a trustee of the building trust), Ahern did not give clear answers.

When O’Neill and Judge Mahon put it to Ahern that most of what he had been asked in the tribunal’s letter of 30 November was within his knowledge, and that the bulk of its queries could have been answered by him immediately, Ahern appeared to become annoyed. The request made in the letter constituted a ‘gigantic undertaking’, he said. Making it clear that he had ‘total confidence’ in Judge Mahon, he continued:

No matter what you say to the counsel for the tribunal they come back with twenty more questions. I started off being asked about my own accounts and my own personal accounts and then my daughters’ and then Celia Larkin’s accounts, and then we get into my mother’s accounts and father’s accounts, and maybe my grandmother’s accounts—she died about one hundred years ago. Where does it stop, chairman? I mean, this is Fianna Fáil Government central, and I don’t control the
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account. I am not the
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account. I didn’t take out any money. I didn’t put [property developer] Owen O’Callaghan’s money into it or anybody else’s money into it. I don’t know what the relevance is.

Ahern accepted that he could have answered some of the questions in the letter immediately. O’Neill asked if Ahern appreciated that asking the tribunal to go to the constituency organisation to get information that was in Ahern’s knowledge, and that he hadn’t disclosed when asked, would delay its inquiries into the
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account. Ahern said he didn’t accept what O’Neill had said. O’Neill said there had been ‘extensive correspondence’ between the tribunal and Ahern on the matter, but the chairperson asked him to move on, and the correspondence was not read out. O’Neill then turned to the issue of the loan that the previous day Ahern had said had been made to a member of the staff.

‘Who was the member of staff referred to?’

‘Celia Larkin,’ Ahern replied.

This was a huge development in the political controversy concerning Ahern. According to his own evidence, political donations given to him had in turn been given to his girlfriend to help her buy a house. In the middle of the property boom, and in the wake of all that had been learnt about Charles Haughey and Ray Burke, it was an enormous blow to Ahern’s reputation and a severe weakening of his hold on the position of Taoiseach.

As soon as Ahern revealed that the ‘staff member’ who received the loan was Larkin, Hugh Millar, the solicitor who had dropped a letter into the tribunal earlier that morning, rose and interrupted. He had been there the previous day but had not said anything. He said he was there to represent Larkin and a surviving occupant of the property that Larkin had bought with the help of the £30,000 from the
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account. His clients objected to what he said was an intrusion into their personal affairs and a matter that was not covered by the tribunal’s terms of reference. The chairperson didn’t agree with this point, saying the tribunal’s interest was in establishing the beneficial ownership of the
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account. Millar also said the matter should be dealt with by way of private inquiry before it became the focus of public hearings; and he said the letter he had delivered that morning, which contained his clients’ outline of the circumstances behind the purchase of the house, should be read into the record if the matter was to be dealt with in public hearings. In the course of his submissions he said he had first been contacted by his clients on the afternoon of 19 February, three days earlier.

O’Neill did not want the letter read out before he had completed his examination of Ahern, but the chairperson decided that it should be read into the record. The letter said the price of the house was £40,100, with the cost above £30,000 coming from its elderly tenants. It included the statement that Ahern had no involvement in agreeing the loan to Larkin.

When questioning resumed, Ahern acknowledged that Larkin was his partner but said the relationship had nothing to do with the transaction.