Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (13 page)

Collins told the tribunal that the
B
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T
account was set up as a contingency fund—a ‘sinking fund’ that would be there in case money was ever needed for St Luke’s. He agreed that funds used for St Luke’s had come from other accounts when there had been money available in the
B
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T
account and also that, although there had been significant withdrawals from the
B
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T
account over the years, there were never any withdrawals for the purpose of maintaining or renovating St Luke’s.

A number of facts appeared to be at odds with Collins’s description of what the
B
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T
account was for and of how the Davy Stockbrokers cheque came to be lodged to it. Firstly, there was the question of why the cheque wasn’t lodged to any account until two-and-a-half months after it was issued. It was issued on 11 November 1992 and lodged on 31 January 1993. At the time it was received, the fund-raisers could not have known that they were going to receive funds in excess of what could be required for the campaign. Collins said he had no recollection of discussing the Davy cheque with Ahern or of how it came to be decided that it would be lodged to the
B
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T
account. According to Collins:

The
B
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T
account, and I will say this until the day I die, is a sinking fund in the event of anything ever happening to Mr Ahern, that the trustees that would be left alive wouldn’t have to pick up any tab on the house, any debt that would be left on it. And that was my view at the time and [also the view of] another person on the committee.

O’Neill pointed out that the bound
PWC
report on the
B
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T
account, which had been given to the tribunal by solicitors acting for the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair and the trustees, had described the purpose of the account as administering funds ‘for the maintenance and upkeep of the property known as St Luke’s.’ When Collins was asked if he had given a description of what the account was for to the accountants from
PWC
he said he hadn’t spoken to anyone from
PWC
. He also said he hadn’t seen the documents prepared by
PWC
before they were given to the tribunal.

Asked about the building trust, Collins said the trustees were the same as the St Luke’s trustees, save that Brennan was a trustee (of the
B
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T
account) and Richardson wasn’t. ‘Richardson wasn’t on the house committee,’ Collins said by way of explanation for Richardson not being on the building trust.

‘Did you intend opening an account for the building trustees?’ O’Neill asked.

‘No. It was for the house committee.’

‘I see. Is there any reason why you didn’t have
H
/
C
then, perhaps, as the name of the account, because it’s not an account of the building trustees?’

‘I have no . . . There is no reason why it’s not
H
/
C
, it’s just that I put
B
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T
for building trust.’

Collins said he had no reason for not giving St Luke’s as the address on the account, nor had he any reason for electing to have the statements on the account kept in the branch. The account was opened nineteen years before Collins appeared to give evidence, and the address on the account from 1995 had been of Collins’s home. He had not mentioned the account in a sworn affidavit of discovery that he had made to the tribunal in 2006. The discovery order included an obligation on him to reveal all accounts into which he had lodged funds. This meant that both Collins and Ahern had left the
B
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T
account out of the list of accounts they had declared to the tribunal after having been served with orders of discovery. Collins said he hadn’t forgotten about the
B
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T
account, which was still in existence with funds on deposit in it, at the time of his sworn affidavit in 2006; but he accepted that the wording of the order of discovery encompassed the
B
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T
account.

Asked when he had last discussed the account with any of the people he said were trustees of the account, Collins replied, ‘Oh, it’s many years ago. I’d say I’ve been out of circulation around there now for about thirteen years.’ The sole surviving member of the house committee from the mid-1990s was Joe Burke. ‘I haven’t spoken to Joe Burke in a long while,’ Collins said.

A mortgage of £75,000 on St Luke’s was taken out in 2000, at a time when there was £47,000 in the
B
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T
account and, according to the evidence given to the tribunal, a loan of £30,000 plus interest out to Larkin. The mortgage was used for substantial work on St Luke’s. Collins’s reply seemed to be that it was decided that constituency workers should be let raise funds to repay the mortgage. He said to O’Neill:

I understand what you’re saying . . . that we should have paid it off with the money that was there; but we always wanted to have a sinking fund there, and that’s why we kept it there. When the work had to be done, let the people go out and fund-raise to pay for that.

Collins was asked about the cash withdrawal of £20,000 the tribunal had been told was made to pay people who were going to carry out work on St Luke’s but which had been returned some months later after it was decided not to go ahead with it.

I took the money out, and Joe Burke, being a builder, I left the money for Joe to see could he have it sorted out. And he got professional advice on it over the period of time to say that the job was too great and too big, that that wouldn’t be able to sort it out . . . He wanted cash to be able to pay people if he wanted to get a job done in a hurry.

Collins said he left the cash for Burke in an envelope in St Luke’s.

My recollection is that I brought it to St Luke’s and left it in the office. And whoever was there, I can’t recall who was there, [I] said, ‘There, make sure Joe Burke gets that.’

He said he had no recollection of relodging the money.

Collins was asked about the joint account he had in the Irish Permanent in Drumcondra with Des Richardson. This account had also been left out of the sworn affidavit of discovery that he had made in 2006. He accepted that he should have told the tribunal about the account. ‘I had completely forgotten about that,’ he said. The names on the account, opened in July 1991, were Des Richardson and Tim Collins. At the time the two men were involved in what Collins said was a small architectural practice called Pilgrim Associates. The account was operated until 1993. Of the 151 withdrawal slips the tribunal retrieved from the bank’s archives, the name of the account was described as
D
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T
on 46 of them, O’Neill said. The initials stood for Des and Tim, Collins agreed, but he said it was not the case that
B
/
T
stood for Bertie and Tim.

When Liam Cooper, a party activist, gave evidence, he told the tribunal something of the history of the O’Donovan Rossa Cumann. He had been active in Fianna Fáil politics in Dublin Central since the early 1980s and was a member of the cumann. It was one of the oldest in Fianna Fáil and could trace its ancestry to Fenian times. It was originally a Fenian cell, he claimed, named after Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who, he pointed out, was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. The cell subsequently became a Sinn Féin cumann in the early twentieth century. Following the foundation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 the Sinn Féin O’Donovan Rossa Cumann transferred
en masse
to Fianna Fáil. ‘It has been the focal point for Fianna Fáil activity in the Drumcondra area since the 1920s.’

Cooper was a long-time secretary of the cumann and had served at officer level in the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair, including as treasurer. At the time he gave evidence he was chairperson of the cumann. He said he had never been a member of the trust that was involved with St Luke’s.

Nor have I ever been involved in fund-raising for this trust. I am aware, as is every other Fianna Fáil member in the constituency, that the trustees ran regular fund-raisers to provide for the expenditure of running the office in St Luke’s and the upkeep of the house.

He explained that what he called the ‘house committee’ was involved in raising funds for St Luke’s and that the committee was independent of the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair structure. He was asked what knowledge he would have had in the period 1994–2001, when he was a treasurer of the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair, of the various accounts that were operated by the house committee. ‘I actually anticipated that you would ask me that,’ he said. ‘So, with your permission, I have a note here for myself so that I can be deadly accurate.’ He was asked not to refer to the note and to tell the tribunal from memory what accounts he knew the committee to be operating. He named the building trust account, the
CODR
account and the long-term deposit account with the
ACC
Bank in Westmoreland Street that held proceeds from the sale of the party premises in Amiens Street.

Although he was aware of the existence of the
B
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T
account, he said he wasn’t aware of the balance in it, or even of the fact that the balance was in thousands rather than hundreds of pounds, which was the norm for most of the accounts with which he was involved. He said he might on occasion briefly mention the
B
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T
account to members of the committee, and might inform constituency
AGMS
that there had been no movement on the account. It was put to him that there was nothing in the records of the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair that had been shown to the tribunal that recorded the
B
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account being mentioned in any capacity. Cooper did not dispute the assertion. ‘I can’t explain that,’ he said.

Joe Burke returned to the witness box on 14 May 2008, the same day that Cooper gave his evidence and the day after Collins’s appearance. Burke had been written to on 8 April and asked for a narrative statement on matters relating to the
B
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account, but he hadn’t supplied it by the time he was called to give evidence. An overweight man who looked both boyish and unhealthy, Burke tended to play with his gold watch while giving his testimony, opening and closing the clasp of the watchstrap. On New Year’s Day 2008 Burke had been rushed to hospital after he was found slumped over the wheel of his Mercedes in Ringsend, having taken an overdose. He had been on a drinking spree the previous day, and events at his home that night had led to the gardaí being called by a young woman he had met in a nightclub. Bertie Ahern had appointed Burke’s partner, Maria Corrigan, to the Senate in 2007. Burke had asked Ahern to make the appointment.

Burke told the tribunal that he had not had any dealings with
PWC
, nor had he looked at the documents they had produced before he entered the witness box. As a trustee of St Luke’s and a member of the house committee, Burke had been served with an order of discovery, which included any documents recording the source of lodgements made to the
B
/
T
account. The constituency treasurer, Dominic Dillane, had appeared at the tribunal the day before Burke and given evidence in relation to the affidavit of discovery he had sworn and that arose from that order. Dillane had been acting as representative for the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair and the trustees, but Burke confirmed that he had not discussed the matter of the
B
/
T
account with Dillane. ‘I haven’t. That would be correct, yes,’ he said.

The
PWC
report on the
B
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T
account identified various sources for lodgements, but, other than two substantial lodgements it said had resulted from golf classics in 1992 and 1995, Burke said he had no knowledge of them. He said he would have had knowledge of them at the time. ‘My memory doesn’t serve me well today,’ he said. He said he had discussed the account with Ahern after Ahern had received a letter from the tribunal on 30 November 2007 asking about the account.

Burke had no specific recall of any of the withdrawals from the
B
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T
account other than the payment made in relation to Celia Larkin’s purchase of a house and the cash withdrawal of £20,000 and subsequent relodgement of an identical amount. In relation to the payment associated with Larkin he said that the fact of the transaction was not discussed with anyone in Fianna Fáil other than his fellow-members of the house committee.

If the account-holders had the option of expending the money as they saw fit, he said, ‘why would I have to go to anybody in Fianna Fáil to tell them what I’m doing?’

‘Because,’ said O’Neill, ‘apparently this was a trust for the benefit ultimately of Fianna Fáil.’

‘At the end of the day, if Mr Ahern leaves politics, yes, that’s correct,’ Burke replied. ‘And since he hasn’t left politics and we weren’t about to hand over to Fianna Fáil, there was no reason to go to anybody to explain what we were doing.’

In relation to the cash withdrawal of £20,000 and later cash lodgement, Burke said he had collected the cash from St Luke’s and put it in a safe in his house so that it would be available if needed for the work on St Luke’s. However, it transpired that it was a larger job than was originally envisaged. ‘The money was handed back.’

O’Neill asked why the money was withdrawn in cash. ‘The old saying is very simple: It’s always nice to see the colour of your money. It was as simple as that.’ Burke said the money was left back to St Luke’s, where he had originally collected it, although he might have used some of the original cash in another transaction.

During Collins’s evidence it was disclosed that there had been another development in the inquiries, again arising as a result of documents retrieved from banking archives. The documents showed that the cash lodgement of £20,000 to the
B
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T
account in October 1994 had been immediately preceded by an unusually large amount of sterling being exchanged in the branch. The British and Irish pounds were at par. Someone had brought £20,000 cash in sterling into the branch, changed it for Irish currency and lodged the cash to the
B
/
T
account.