Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (2 page)

A POLITICAL REPORTER’S DIARY

September 2006

S
eptember is when the
TD
s pretend to be back, but aren’t really. The Fianna Fáilers went to some hotel in Mayo for their annual think-in. A Deputy balanced a jug of water on his head in the bar at 4 a.m.

Bertie was interviewed by ‘Morning Ireland’ at breakfast in the hotel. He had a cut at Enda Kenny [Fine Gael leader], noting the local fellow was ‘around a long time’, having entered the Dáil in 1975, two years before himself. So much for Enda’s portraying himself as the poster-child of national vigour.

But the remark only allowed the Taoiseach to be asked if he was nearing the end of his own shelf life. He responded with a classic Bertieism—that he knew his own ‘shelf-by date’. In America a year ago, when Bertie spoke on the issue of the illegal Irish, he said that if support dried up in Congress we would have to ‘fight our own canoe’.

In the afternoon Brian Cowen [Minister for Finance] promised that
FF
would have the ‘bottle for the battle’ when the election came around.

7 September

Mary Harney resigns after no fewer than thirteen years at the helm of the Progressive Democrats (
PD
s). She will be remembered for banning smoky coal in Dublin and for not being Charlie Haughey. She also blocked the Bertie Bowl [the proposed football stadium for west Dublin]. Her popularity has been dropping like a stone since she became Minister for Health.

‘Why, I am not worthy,’ says Michael McDowell [Minister for Justice and Harney’s successor as head of the
PD
s].

12 September

Fine Gael hold their parliamentary party gathering in Sligo, and claim they will be able to pick up an extra 26 seats next time out. That’s
twenty-six
. It sounds preposterous.

Pat Rabbitte [Labour Party leader] shows up to signal that Labour is willing. Later on, in the early hours, he leaves the north-west to return home. As it happens, his car is almost out of fuel—but there are no petrol stations between Sligo and Dublin open for custom in the early hours.

Pat drives on empty until the motor is spluttering. All the way through Leitrim he has fears of being stranded, having to sleep in his car. Eventually he passes a single old pump, relic of the 1950s, in the village of Newtownforbes.

He is reduced to banging on a Longford garage door at 1:30 a.m, miraculously raising a grizzled head from an upstairs window. ‘Is it yourself?’ asks the vest-clad rustic. ‘It is,’ replies Pat. The pump is opened, manages to dispense modern unleaded, and Pat makes it back to Dublin.

Five days later Mayo are crushed in the All-Ireland Final.

20 September

There’s a court case today in which a lorry driver who consumed half a bottle of vodka (and some beer) before attempting to collect a skip ‘made shit’ of Michael McDowell’s driveway.

That’s what an angry Minister said to the driver, before noticing the latter was under the weather and calling the cops. McDowell was ‘ranting and raving’, the accused man managed to reveal in court before being fined and banned.

It was the week McDowell, new
PD
leader, announced it was party policy to send all trucks out of Dublin to a new port half way to Dundalk.

21 September

Yikes! A landmine this morning in the
Irish Times
. It reveals that the Mahon Tribunal is investigating payments to the Taoiseach.

The money is said to have come from businessman David McKenna in 1993 when Mr Ahern was Minister for Finance. Bertie, on a constituency visit to Clare, admits the reports are accurate, the source ‘impeccable’, and that whoever leaked it must have seen ‘the full file’. But he also says the amounts quoted are ‘off the wall’ at €50,000–100,000.

The Taoiseach later suggests at a doorstep interview that some shadowy people have been out to discredit him over the last few days. The
Irish Times
says the money is connected to legal bills Mr Ahern had in 1993.

David McKenna is a millionaire who made his money out of Marlborough Recruitment, a firm that unfortunately went bankrupt. This is a peculiar story, and initially everyone seems to be adopting a wait-and-see attitude. There are some suggestions the money may be as little as £10,000 but whether the Minister for Finance should be taking even a few bob from businessmen, personal friends or not, is another question.

Bertie is furious. At a further impromptu press conference he denounces the leak as scurrilous, and says the money is a fraction of the amounts usually thrown around in tribunal stories. He says he’s not going to answer questions about his ‘Holy Communion and Confirmation money, or what I got for my birthday.’ (He was 55 on 12 September.)

Mr Ahern, who in recent years flew to Manchester United matches with Mr McKenna in the latter’s private jet, won’t say the exact amount involved, or what it was used for. He mentions his separation. Meanwhile it is emerging that more people than McKenna may be involved.

The story is developing, and is already damaging.

Fine Gael quotes the Taoiseach in the Dáil from September 1997, speaking about the McCracken tribunal.

‘The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone.’

Two days beforehand there was a
BBC
‘Panorama’ broadcast about Premiership managers and claimed corruption. Now, with a week to go to the new Dáil session, Bertie is mixed up with alleged ‘bungs’.

22 September

Swirling rumours in Leinster House and Government Buildings. The suggestions are that the total sum Bertie received was either £10,000 or £20,000, with four donors giving equal amounts. The pressure is on for the full list of names and amounts, so the public can judge the individuals and their possible links to Government.

Bertie makes a defensive prepared statement after a report launch in Government Buildings. He complains twice of the ‘sinister’ nature of the leak, and refuses to take questions, walking out past journalists who sit there in stony silence.

Yesterday the Taoiseach complained of reports (in
Village
magazine) that appeared to link him to bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Jersey and the Dutch Antilles. Except Bertie called them the ‘Dutch Anthills’. Trust the media to make a mountain out of an anthill.

Did he or didn’t he pay tax on these payments? If they were loans, to get him out of a tight spot, no tax would be payable. Bertie didn’t say they were loans, but instead that he ‘dealt with them properly’. As Minister for Finance at the time, of course, he was responsible for clawing in the nation’s tax, as well as being responsible for the tax authorities themselves, while also capable of re-writing tax law all by himself.

It is still all to play for in what the
Irish Daily Mail
is calling Bertie’s biggest political crisis. His body language this morning was tight, testy and all bad. The latest rumour is that Miriam Ahern is due to give evidence to the Mahon Tribunal in October, which scarcely seems credible. Another is that the money raised was not for legal fees but intended as a ‘golden handbag’ in the marriage break-up.

The sooner the full truth is out the better. Everyone is waiting for the Sunday papers in 48 hours, but Ursula Halligan of
TV
3—which last night had lurid footage of tens and twenties in Euro banknotes filling the screen—dares to mention the phrase ‘early general election’.

23 September

The
Irish Times
reports that the monies were loans, and were accepted on the basis that they would be repaid. It’s suggested that at least some of the benefactors then wouldn’t take the money back. Thirteen years on, some amounts remain outstanding. Does this make them gifts?

Couldn’t Bertie, who signed blank cheques for Charlie after all, have sent his friends similar slips in the post if they were too shy to accept them in person? And what’s with the shyness, anyway—what is Irish business coming to, if people won’t allow their backs to be scratched in turn after they have seen to Bertie’s seven-year itch?

He is truly blessed. His friends won’t turn their backs on him. They are also maintaining mortared-up mouths when the media ring.

Michael McDowell goes to Finland to grapple with all these moral questions that the
PD
s used to pronounce upon with such penetrating rectitude. Silence from the moral mountaintop so far.

24 September

The Sunday papers are tamer than a dead goldfish. They haven’t managed to find out anything new, but still editorialise a bit of outrage. Defence Minister Willie O’Dea goes on ‘This Week’ and blusters that it would be disloyal of the Taoiseach to reveal the names of his loyal friends.

He says he is sickened by talk of ‘the public interest’ when the case falls into the category of mere public curiosity. As if to confirm, a
Sunday Independent
telephone poll—the equivalent of asking your mates in the pub—says that 81 per cent of people want further details.

25 September

Bertie goes to Dublin Zoo to see the animals. Then he trots right past them, ignoring their microphones and tape recorders, greeting the zoo director instead—and both enter the Meerkat Restaurant to launch a five-year development plan.

Like an elephant in the living room, there is a great unspoken issue as the Taoiseach gazes past the massed ranks of predatory lenses and poised notebooks to tell all the zoo people what a great job they are doing.

Being the king of the political jungle, Bertie naturally has to do a walkabout in the gardens afterwards. He feigns not to hear questions as to whether he is going to make a statement. The colour writers are in the long grass, watching every ripple of his sleek tailored suit.

Snakes, vultures, monkeys who see no evil—if you can’t muster a bit of a chuckle column out of an event like this, you should really jack in journalism. The rhinos are too far away to admire the thickness of Bertie’s hide as he struts around, not even deigning to state that there will be no statement, with the odd squirrel perched quizzically, as if studying for tips on how to store stuff away.

Bertie is still shaking his head at questioners as he dives into a limo to be driven away. There are four plain-clothes detectives about, all packing weaponry, which is a doubling of his usual guard. It probably has to do with the fact that Ceann Comhairle Rory O’Hanlon was heckled and jostled today by hospital campaigners at the opening of the Monaghan bypass, which is likely the last bypass to be performed locally if
A&E
and surgery units are closed.

The wildebeest of the media dumbly follow Bertie next to Griffith College on the South Circular Road, where daughter Cecelia learned to write books like
PS, I Love You
. The Taoiseach promptly gets stuck in a lift with Cyprian Brady. The dour is stuck, and so is the door.

We know the Taoiseach is in a tight spot, but this is ridiculous. He, Cyp, a detective, and some Griffith College type are packed like sardines into a tiny, stationary cage. Workmen with hard-hats try to get the steel enclosure open. After five minutes they manage it, but then the occupants have to crouch from their platform and jump a few feet to the floor.

Not the Taoiseach’s day.

26 September

Bertie gives a special interview to
RTE
television news in his St Luke’s constituency office in which he admits accepting £39,000 (€50,000) from a dozen apostles in two tranches in 1993 and 1994. The doubt of the benefit is now gone; it remains to be seen if the public will give him the political benefit of the doubt.

The Taoiseach, in 25 minutes, is absolutely candid about his marriage break-up. He says the money he received was to help him over that ‘very dark, very sad’ period. Some of it went towards a £20,000 educational trust for his daughters—and at this point he closed his eyes and bowed his head, a father emotional at the recall of difficult times past. He had managed to save £50,000 up to the point of his legal separation, but after agreeing the final details in November 1993, after several dates in the High Court that year, he was left without a house, ‘the £50,000 was gone’ and he still had legal bills.

He took out a loan at the Allied Irish Banks branch in O’Connell St to meet the legal costs. The next month his friends organised a whip-round, even though he had previously refused a fund-raiser to assist him with his personal finances. He was presented with £22,500—seven people paying £2,500 each, and an eighth man paying £5,000.

‘They gave me the £22,500, and I said that I would take this as a debt of honour, that I would repay it in full,’ said Bertie, eyes as wide as sincerity would allow. He said that he assured his benefactors that he would pay interest on it. ‘I know the tax law, I’m an accountant.’

But he added: ‘I haven’t repaid the money because they refused to take it.’ In 13 years, he had never so much as paid interest, he disclosed—but an unrepayable loan is a gift, as the Opposition later point out. Bertie lamely offered that he thought his friends would accept repayment now, ‘because they see the difficulty’.

The first bunch of bail-outs included Fianna Fáil fund-raiser Des Richardson, stockbroker Padraic O’Connor, former chairman of
CERT
(the hotel training agency) Jim Nugent, David McKenna, Fintan Gunne, personal friends Paddy Reilly and Mick Collins, and the publican Charlie Chawke, now one of the owners of Sunderland
FC
.

‘Later on in 1994 another four friends gave me £16,500,’ says Bertie. They were Joe Burke, Dermot Carew, Barry English and Paddy Reilly, ‘known to my friends as Paddy the Plasterer’. Joe Burke had been appointed by Bertie as Chairman of the Dublin Port Authority. Dermot Carew owns the Beaumont House pub, and before that the Hill 16 premises. Barry English is a wealthy engineer, while Paddy the Plasterer has since moved on to become the landlord of a myriad rental properties in Dublin.