Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (14 page)

When the new evidence was raised with Burke he said:

At the time, in 1994/1995, I was doing a huge amount of pub refurbishing in Ireland. I remember at one particular time we had about eight or ten pubs. We would have been buying a lot of memorabilia and salvage and that in England. Since I didn’t have any bank account in England, I would have been using sterling. And when the question came to me, Did I give it back in sterling, I was kind of stumbled as to say I did or I didn’t. But it’s possible that I did.

He said he would have put the cash in an envelope and given it in St Luke’s to whomever was there so that Collins could collect it. He would not have told the person he gave it to that it contained a large amount of cash, Burke said.

I’ve always the policy that if you tell someone that it’s cash in an envelope, it will cause them to fret and worry. If you don’t tell them anything, they’ll just think it’s documents. It’s the policy I have until today, by the way . . . I just left the envelope and possibly used the words ‘That’s to be collected by Tim Collins.’

Asked by Judge Mahon why he would have used sterling he had purchased for use in England to repay a debt in Drumcondra, Burke said:

I’ll tell you very simply, chairman. The Christmas season was coming up and all our works were finishing. Our pubs would have been finishing. It would probably have been a conscious decision for me to get rid of whatever surplus cash that was there that wasn’t required for the rest of the year. As simple as that, chairman. Very simple.

Burke said the withdrawal and subsequent lodgement had occurred without the generation of any documents to record the transactions. Likewise, he did not have any documents in relation to the golf classics that he said occurred in 1992 and 1995 and resulted in, respectively, the lodgement of £19,000 and £10,000 to the
B
/
T
account. Bank records showed that the £19,000 lodged in 1992 arose after a cheque for £20,000 was brought into the bank, the lodgement made and £1,000 taken away in cash. There were no associated documents. ‘But are you asking me, “Did it happen?” Yes, it happened.’

O’Neill pointed out that in June 2006 Ahern had informed the tribunal that certain large lodgements to the constituency No. 1 account were the proceeds of golf classics and annual fund-raising dinners. The No. 1 account, the tribunal was told, was funded solely by these events. Burke could not explain why the proceeds from the golf classics in 1992 and 1995 had gone into the
B
/
T
account in those years, rather than into the No. 1 account, or how such round-figure amounts could emerge as the profits from the holding of golf classics. He said he presumed that the lodgements occurred because the account needed the money at the time, but O’Neill said the balances did not show this. While the
B
/
T
account had funds in it, the No. 1 account ended up in the red at the end of each year, he said.

O’Neill put up a note on the overhead projector showing the manuscript minutes of a house committee meeting of 22 February 2008. The note said that the committee in the period 1986–96 did not formally exist and that Burke ran the annual golf classic. ‘From 1997 to now, house committee has been officer board with Joe Burke.’ Burke didn’t dispute the accuracy of the note. ‘Without a formal house committee. Yes. Yes. Without a formal. Yes. The word being formal,’ he said.

In March 2008 Ahern travelled as Taoiseach to the United States, where he attended a St Patrick’s Day function in the White House and presented the President, George W. Bush, with a crystal bowl of shamrock. On 19 March, while Ahern was still abroad, Blair Hughes, the former manager of the Drumcondra branch of the Irish Permanent, gave evidence to the tribunal. One of the lodgements Hughes was asked about was the £20,000 sterling lodged to the
B
/
T
account on 24 October 1994, the month before Albert Reynolds’s resignation as Taoiseach and his replacement by Ahern.

The documents linked to the lodgement were put on the overhead screen, and Hughes described how they recorded £20,000 being lodged in cash, the code for the teller who processed it (c87), where it occurred and the transaction number assigned to it (transaction 54).

The tribunal then displayed another document, which Hughes explained was a foreign currency purchase form that had been used to buy £20,000 sterling from a customer. The customer, Hughes explained, was given £20,000 in Irish pounds in return. The code for the teller who processed the transaction was the same (c87), and the transaction number was 55. The person who carried out both transactions had signed his name to both documents, and Hughes said the signature was that of an employee, Michael Murnane.

Hughes was asked if the documents showed that someone had come into the bank and lodged £20,000 sterling to the
B
/
T
account. ‘Correct,’ he answered.

But there was more. Other documents on the screen showed £6,000 sterling being brought into the branch on 9 March 1994. The lodgement was divided between Ahern’s personal account (£4,000) and the accounts of his two daughters (£1,000 each). The documents also showed that on 9 May 1994 a sum of £5,450 sterling was brought in and divided between Ahern’s and his daughters’ accounts. The next day £50 sterling was lodged to Ahern’s account. On 28 October 1994, two days after the £20,000
B
/
T
lodgement, £4,000 sterling was lodged to Ahern’s account.

In total, then, £35,500 sterling in cash was lodged to the Ahern and
B
/
T
accounts in the Irish Permanent in Drumcondra over a period of eight months in 1994, the year immediately following Ahern’s finalisation of his separation agreement with his wife and his re-engagement with the Irish banking system. These lodgements were on top of the sterling cash that had been indisputably lodged to his account with the
AIB
in O’Connell Street, which Ahern said he had been given in Manchester.

After Hughes’s evidence, which was based on documents that had been supplied to Ahern on 5 March, Ahern’s counsel, Colm Ó hOisín, did not opt to ask any questions. He said his client wanted to reserve his position and was still considering documents he had been receiving as recently as five days earlier.

Ahern had provided no explanation up to the subsequent sitting of the Dáil in April 2008, when he was due to be questioned by the opposition about how sterling had turned up in his Irish Permanent account. Instead of going into the chamber and answering questions he announced his decision to retire as Taoiseach in May, which would provide him with the time to make an arranged address to the joint houses in Washington and to finish off with a meeting with the Rev. Ian Paisley at the site of the Battle of the Boyne. Ahern didn’t answer the question about the sterling until he was back in the tribunal witness box in June, by which time he was no longer Taoiseach and it was already becoming clear that the economic boom had been badly mismanaged. When he arrived at Dublin Castle he made less effort than hitherto to be pleasant with the photographers gathered to snap him going in. He gave sworn testimony that some of the sterling in his building society account had been won on the horses. As soon as he mentioned horses there was loud and derisive laughter from the crowded public gallery. It was a moment of public humiliation. Having experienced years of adulation and praise, Bertie Ahern was on his way to becoming a target for anger and revilement.

  PART THREE

Power

Chapter
6  

DEPUTY

W
hen All Hallows Missionary College was founded in 1842, with the intention of providing a pathway for pious and talented young Irishmen who wanted to propagate the faith abroad, Drumcondra was a rural landscape with few inhabitants and little by way of claims to fame.
The Missionary College of All Hallows
by Kevin Condon, published by the college in 1986, contains a map of the area from the 1840s showing the bridge across the River Tolka and a small gathering of houses on the south bank. Over the bridge and north up the slope of Santry Road is a building on a turn into a narrow road that curves as it makes its way towards Goosegreen Lane, part of which is now known as Grace Park Road. The building on the corner is the Cat and Cage pub. The narrow road winding up towards Goosegreen Lane is now called Church Avenue and is best known for the fact that Bertie Ahern grew up there.

The avenue gets its name from the Church of St John the Baptist, a modest Church of Ireland building with a small surrounding graveyard whose granite headstones, for the most part, lean like the Tower of Pisa. Beyond the church the road follows a solid stone wall that is part of the southern perimeter of the All Hallows grounds, a wall that once marked the perimeter of the lands of a reasonably grand residence called Drumcondra House, which dates from the 1720s.

All Hallows was founded because of the determination of a priest called John Hand. Condon relates that Hand was from Oldcastle, Co. Meath, the son of a poor farmer who, as Hand progressed through his ecclesiastic career, appears to have been evicted from his lands and to have fallen on hard times, ending up working as a herdsman. Hand attended a seminary outside Navan and, later, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. On his ordination he worked with a school in Usher’s Island, on the banks of the Liffey, before being assigned in 1838 to the parish of Phibsborough. The church, St Peter’s, was a modest one, and Phibsborough was a village on the fringe of the city. Migrants came in from the countryside to settle there, and it was a place of great poverty.

Hand was impressed by the work of the French Association for the Propagation of the Faith, which visited Ireland about that time, and he began to lobby his archbishop and the hierarchy about his idea for the establishment of a missionary college. A proposal submitted to a bishops’ assembly in Dublin in 1841 was rejected, but Hand persisted and, in time, was sent to the Continent to study how the missionary colleges there were run. Within a year he returned with a rescript, or written papal decision, giving him the authority to open a missionary house in Dublin.

Drumcondra House had been built by Sir Marmaduke Coghill, a member of the Irish Parliament before the Act of Union in 1800. Its later owners included John Claudius Beresford, who was known as a fearsome hunter and torturer of rebels during and after the 1798 Rising. Hand negotiated a lease on the house and its twenty-four acres with Dublin City Council. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Daniel O’Connell, was a supporter of, and contributor to, the project.

The finance for the operation of the college came from subscriptions raised from the faithful. Hand died after a wet and cold fund-raising tour of Co. Meath in 1846. He was buried in the grounds of the institution he founded.

On the day I visited the college a man pointed out that the grounds are on a hill and that you can look from the doors of what once was Drumcondra House towards the city and the Dublin Mountains beyond. He said the church authorities liked to have their institutions on hills, to serve as a reminder to the faithful below. He listed a stream of institutions on higher ground in cities around Continental Europe, saying that, before the creation of organised police forces, fear of God was a particularly important factor in social control.

Within fifty years of its foundation All Hallows had produced more than a thousand missionaries. They went to Britain, North and South America, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Mauritius and elsewhere, with many of the graduates becoming bishops in their adopted dioceses. Half the permanent Catholic missionaries in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century came from All Hallows, according to Condon. It was a major instrument in Irish institutional Catholic power.

Bertie Ahern’s father, Con, was born in 1904 and came from Ballyfeard, near Kinsale, Co. Cork. He ran messages for the Irish Volunteers during the War of Independence, and when, in 1922, de Valera and his associates rejected the Treaty agreed with the British by Michael Collins and his fellow-plenipotentiaries in London, plunging Ireland into civil war, Ahern sided with the anti-Treaty forces and joined the
IRA
. The Civil War in Cork was a noticeably bloody affair. According to Bertie Ahern, his father was interned in the Curragh camp, twice went on hunger strike and remained a hard-line republican into the 1930s. Up to the 1970s the Gardaí still considered Ahern to have republican sympathies. According to Bertie Ahern’s friend and long-time supporter Paddy Duffy, ‘the father had been a member of the old
IRA
. There was a Southern, rebel Cork atmosphere in the Aherns, certainly about the father.’ Bertie Ahern told
RTE
radio in 2004 that his father was a tough man, who, if someone got on his nerves, would ‘clock them as quick as he’d look at them.’