Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (19 page)

Gradually it added a great lustre to his personality as a conciliator. And there is no doubt that it is one of the strongest aspects of his personality, his conciliatory demeanour and his capacity to talk people into agreement. People liked him—people like him—even though they never got close to him.

No doubt about it, if you believe there ought to be a Minister for Labour, Bertie was ideally suited to it. He managed to convey that he was the unions’ man, while the employers knew that he was really their man. And that’s a rare achievement. Bertie always had contacts with prominent people in the business community and he used those links very adroitly. He was always well informed.

There is no doubt that Ahern brought the employers and the unions together to a degree that was unprecedented. It was not something that happened by accident; rather it was a policy adopted by Fianna Fáil while it was in opposition. The genesis for the idea came from the labour movement.

In 1986 Ahern and Haughey had visited the leadership of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in their offices in Raglan Road, Ballsbridge, to discuss a plan being developed by Congress. It wanted to redress the chronic unemployment situation and suggested an arrangement with the Government and the employers whereby the unions would provide industrial peace and moderate wage demands in return for an easing of the tax burden on employees and Government policies aimed at job creation. Ironically, the trade union movement was not getting on well with the FitzGerald Government, even though the coalition included the Labour Party. Fine Gael has never been seen as sympathetic to the movement, while the Labour Party, despite receiving financial support from it, has often felt that it is not the trades unions’ favourite party.

In government, Ahern took the Congress plan and ran with it. His involvement with the partnership process, and his dealings with the unions and the employers, was one of the great springboards of his political career.

Duffy described the partnership model as ‘a sound Christian democratic basis for life and for living in a nation.’ He said a book could be written that would deal solely with the amount of personal input Ahern had in bringing the trade union movement into the role of being an equal partner in the economic management of the country and with ‘how that consensus transformed the country for fifteen, seventeen, eighteen years.’

According to Duffy, the use of patronage played a role in Ahern’s long-term dealings with the trade union movement and in his rationalisation of a movement that had a lot of small, long-established unions.

Ahern facilitated patronage in the sense that they were all brought into the new system. Many of the trade unions were given money to rationalise. They were looked after in terms of being on all the boards of every institution that was ever created, so that the whole model of patronage was created where the representatives of the workers were now actually sitting on all these boards. They were brought right into the parlour and the office. It was no longer a case of agitating from outside the door and on the street. By the time he was finished they were all part of the new system. That took an unbelievable amount of work over twenty years to accomplish. It took unbelievable powers of persuasion, to persuade people to merge—to give up status. And moving on from there, to bring in the employers. He did the same work again with all the employers. He got to know all the main employers and, of course, from a very early stage he took a huge personal interest in the labour-relations machinery. He relished the detail of how that worked and became a personal friend of all the people who were selected and promoted to do those jobs.

Another development Quinn noted during Ahern’s reign with the Department of Labour was the move by the state training agency for the tourism industry,
CERT
, from its head office in Clonskeagh to new offices in Amiens Street, in Ahern’s constituency. Two architectural firms worked on the new head office: Arthur Gibney and Partners and Pilgrim and Associates. Tim Collins and Des Richardson were both involved with Pilgrim, which has featured in the proceedings of the Mahon Tribunal. To explain about Pilgrim, it is necessary to temporarily abandon the narrative of Ahern’s political career.

Pilgrim was set up by Collins and the architect Tim Rowe in the late 1980s. They met when working on a hospital. Collins’s speciality was laying floors, but his function in the new business was finding clients for what was to be a small architectural practice. Richardson became a director of the company but was not so involved in its day-to-day business. Richardson told the tribunal that his main function was providing workers when they were needed, through his employment firm, Workforce.

Collins and Richardson, according to the latter, had met doing political fund-raising and became associates and friends. Richardson, a tall, strong-looking man who often wore pin-striped suits, gave the impression in the Mahon Tribunal witness box of being tough and clear-minded. Collins was a quieter man, less willing to engage. At the time of his appearances as part of the tribunal investigating Ahern’s finances, Collins was unwell and submitted doctors’ certificates as part of his dealings with it.

Collins became a director of Workforce, and, as we have seen, he and Richardson were both trustees of St Luke’s and directors of Pilgrim. Collins gave evidence to the tribunal about matters other than Ahern’s money. He was called as a witness to modules in which the tribunal investigated testimony from Frank Dunlop that he had given bribes to Dublin councillors in the hope of getting land that belonged to clients of Pilgrim rezoned. Collins at all times denied that he had any knowledge of such payments.

One module involved lands at Cloghran, in north Co. Dublin, bought for approximately £180,000 in 1989 by a consortium of three men, including John Butler, who Collins said was a long-standing friend. Butler was associated with a scaffolding company called Scafform, which did work for the Fianna Fáil ard-fheis and also provided services to Joe Burke’s pub-renovation business. In 1989 Collins was involved in Butler’s sale to Richardson of 50 City Quay in Dublin. Butler regularly attended Ahern’s annual fund-raising dinners, held in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, during this period. Up to 350 people would attend the dinners, which are usually considered to have been Richardson’s brainchild. The men who were the trustees of St Luke’s, as well as the solicitor Gerry Brennan, were the main organisers. Ahern’s partner, Celia Larkin, may also have had a role, Richardson told the tribunal. According to Dunlop’s evidence to the tribunal, some of the clients he brought to the Ahern dinners were people on whose behalf he was making corrupt payments to Dublin councillors. The clients told the tribunal they had not known he was making the payments.

Pilgrim started to work for Butler and his associates in relation to the Cloghran lands. Collins said Butler and his partners ran a restaurant called the Courtyard in Donnybrook, Dublin.

Well, you see, how it came about was they wanted to replicate the Courtyard on the north side of Dublin, and that was how I earned my living, driving around looking for properties, trying to match them up, and I found a site and I thought it would be suitable and I brought it to them.

Collins said he just cold-called on the owners of the land.

I don’t know. I just drove in off the back; it was at the back of the Coachman’s Inn. I drove in one day, and this man, I asked him would he think of selling.

Collins’s hope was that he would at one stage be rewarded by Butler and his partners.

I would hope to get a finder’s fee at some stage . . . Nothing written down. I trusted the people I was dealing with.

Pilgrim worked on a plan to have a hotel built on the lands, though no plan appears to have been submitted to Dublin County Council. In 1992 Collins was instrumental in introducing Butler to Frank Dunlop. He said that it was generally accepted that Dunlop knew the councillors and was good at public relations and that he had introduced other landowners and developers to Dunlop. When it was put to him at the tribunal that he had told Dunlop that he knew that councillors would have to be paid, he said, ‘That’s a lie.’ In the end the lands were sold in 1996 for approximately £1.6 million. This was a sixfold increase in value.

Collins gave evidence to a number of tribunal modules that looked into parcels of land owned by different parties who in turn became clients of Pilgrim and whom Collins introduced to Dunlop. In all cases Dunlop said he had made corrupt payments, but Collins, Rowe and their clients denied that they knew this was happening. Collins also told the tribunal that in or around 1994 he and Rowe moved to Project Management, a large architectural firm run by Ambrose Kelly, where Collins again practised as a land agent and a purveyor of clients while Rowe worked as an architect. Kelly gave evidence to the tribunal, in particular about his dealings with Liam Lawlor, the Fianna Fáil
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who was the focus of extensive corruption inquiries by the tribunal. In his evidence Dunlop said he had made corrupt payments to Lawlor in relation to the securing of council support for a development at Quarryvale, near Lucan, Co. Dublin, now Liffey Valley Shopping Centre.

Richardson told the tribunal that he came to know Dunlop in or around 1993, when Ahern asked him to work full-time on raising money for Fianna Fáil. At the time Ahern was Minister for Finance, party treasurer and chairperson of the Fianna Fáil finance committee. The position he created for Richardson was a new one. The party owed £3½ million. Richardson said his original intention had been to restructure the party’s fund-raising operation at home and abroad and return to his own work after about two years.

The party had its own structures based at its head office in Upper Mount Street, with a finance officer and audited accounts, but Richardson operated outside this framework. He set up office in the Berkeley Court Hotel in Ballsbridge and ran his own operation, informing head office of his progress and handing over the money raised. It is not a parallel operation in the sense of the one Ahern had developed within Dublin Central, though it has echoes of it. Richardson was involved in both.

An example of what he did was given during the tribunal’s hearings when evidence was heard about a dinner in a house in Cork in March 1993. Approximately twenty businesspeople attended, ten of whom apparently made cash or cheque payments on the night, leaving the money in envelopes on a hall or dining-room table. Among those in attendance was the Cork property developer Owen O’Callaghan, who had a role in drafting the invitation list. Dunlop was acting for O’Callaghan at the time in relation to the Quarryvale project. He said O’Callaghan did not know about the corrupt payments he was making, and O’Callaghan denied any knowledge of them.

Dunlop met Richardson before the dinner to help him draft a few words on Fianna Fáil’s financial needs and its future aspirations. On the day after the dinner, Richardson made two lodgements of £25,000. He could not recall later why he had lodged it in two instalments.

When Ahern became party leader in December 1994 he asked Richardson to stay as the party’s fund-raiser until the following election. Richardson was extremely successful in getting people to hand over money. He cleared the party’s debts and so contributed in no small way to Ahern’s political success. He remained the party’s key figure in raising funds from supporters up to 1999.

Richardson told the tribunal that, soon after his appointment as a fund-raiser, Dunlop offered to help him if he required it in any way. He said Dunlop, who had served as Government press officer during Haughey’s time in power, subsequently helped him with the drafting of letters looking for support and had also helped with the writing of speeches. The two men ended up going into the lobbying and public relations business together.

One of the difficulties with the evidence Richardson gave in relation to the various companies he worked with was that he was negligent in making filings to the Companies Registration Office. In February 1992 a company called Willdover was incorporated, with a registered address at 50 City Quay. It was owned by Richardson, but he never filed the documents to show that he was a shareholder and director. ‘The intention was there but it never happened.’ He invoiced Fianna Fáil for his work for the party using Willdover, he said. The pattern appears to have been an invoice for £5,000 each month, though Richardson said the amount would include recompense for money he had spent on party matters.

Richardson was also involved with a company called Berraway, which was incorporated in April 1992. Again, he did not register his position as a director or shareholder of the company. Initially it was involved in property development, with a Co. Meath man, Éamonn Duignan, as one of the three partners, Dunlop being the other. A banking document displayed at the tribunal showed the three men signing it as directors of Berraway in September 1993, though Richardson said he was never a registered director. In or around June 1994 Berraway began renting office space from Dunlop, at 25 Upper Mount Street, the building used by Dunlop for his firm Frank Dunlop and Associates. Dunlop’s firm was a very lucrative business that had a lot of
bona fide
blue-chip clients who used Dunlop as a political lobbyist, but it also involved Dunlop running a substantial sideline as the organiser of political corruption in the Dublin planning process. He later pleaded guilty to corruption and was sentenced to two years in prison, with six months suspended. Dunlop also provided continuing advice and services to Fianna Fáil, including operating as director of elections.

Soon after Berraway moved to Dunlop’s building, Richardson, Dunlop and Duignan began using a partnership structure for their property development ventures, and Berraway came under Richardson’s sole control. He opened an account in the company’s name with the Montrose branch of the Bank of Ireland in Donnybrook. Then, about the time when Ahern became party leader, Richardson began using Berraway to invoice Fianna Fáil. According to his evidence, he also began invoicing the party a flat fee of £5,000 per month, with expenses incurred during his work being dealt with separately.