Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (4 page)

So the sneaky leaker is safe, and only Bertie stands on the precipice. Meanwhile in the pubs after a torrid working week, people are asking themselves if they really want to lose the Taoiseach over a relatively trifling amount accepted a dozen years ago.

30 September

Michael McDowell has been having second thoughts too. In today’s papers he is quoted as saying he has an ‘abhorrence’ of heads on plates. That might be news to Mary Harney, but it is decidedly good news for Bertie.

The Opposition immediately accuse the
PD
s of running the white flag up the pole. They predict a climbdown as soon as Bertie clears the air. They even suggest McDowell might be helping Bertie to write his script.

A fly in this soothing ointment is the emergence of a claim that one of the amounts given to Bertie in 1993, from Padraic O’Connor, was a cheque drawn on the corporate account of
NCB
Stockbrokers.

Rather puts a hole in the ‘personal loans’ story.

1 October

The Sundays again fail to break any new ground. But they do report that Bertie Ahern has repaid with interest the loans he received from his apostles. Mr Ahern sent out 12 cheques on Friday, totalling €90,867, to be personally delivered by courier.

The amount includes €40,000 in accumulated interest, reflecting an effective rate of 5 per cent compounded over the years. This is a huge step by the Taoiseach in his political rehabilitation. Most of the recipients redirect the money to charity.

The
Sunday Indo
says that by repaying the money ‘with such apparent ease’, Mr Ahern has left himself open to the accusation that he could have done so at any stage over the last few years, and is only doing so now to save his career.

But the most important material is the sampling of public opinion done by a couple of papers. Six out of ten think Bertie was wrong to accept money while in office. But nearly two-thirds (65%) do not believe he should resign.

There is a decided climate of forgiveness now, overriding detail, nuance and points of principle or moral ethics. Enda Kenny still makes the point that his party wouldn’t stand for it, and that if the same material had come out about him, he would no longer be leader. Again, this needn’t surprise, nor affect matters much.

It’s a week since Willie O’Dea said that being lectured on morality by Fine Gael was akin to being called ‘big, green and ugly’ by the Incredible Hulk.

Even the little issue of the corporate cheque is being teased out into meaninglessness. It turns out it was a bank draft, not a company counterfoil, went to Bertie’s solicitor anyway, and the Taoiseach needn’t have known anything other than that it was a donation by an individual.

Meanwhile lots of old buffers with businesses in Britain are coming out and half remembering the Manchester gathering, held in the Four Seasons hotel, and they are vague and kindly and ‘ah, sure God help us,’ and it is all grist to Bertie’s mill.

One of them tells Pat Kenny on the radio that he met Tim Kilroe of Aer Arann at the urinals in the hotel toilet and the latter happened to mention the whip-around for some fella from the Irish parliament who had ‘woman problems’.

3 October

Bertie doesn’t clarify a thing in his next Dáil appearance, despite expectations that he was going to copiously explain, beat his breast, and plead for mercy—leaving the other side so tactically surprised that they only manage to rehearse some of their old indignation, to little effect.

They may have been banking on some new hassle emerging, or the Taoiseach showing a few more chinks in his armour; but instead he stonewalls. The entire Cabinet sits alongside him as he proceeds to read a deadly dull speech outlining how he did nothing wrong.

He can’t remember practically anyone who was at the Manchester meeting. Wouldn’t trust his memory in any case. Some of his friends from Dublin were there, but ‘all as I knows is’ they didn’t get the whip-round going.

‘As I survey the events of the last two weeks, I realise that my judgement in accepting help from good and loyal friends and the gift in Manchester (albeit in the context of personal and family circumstances) was an error,’ manages Bertie.

‘It was a misjudgement although not in breach of any law or code of conduct at the time,’ he adds. ‘It was not illegal or impermissible to have done what I did. But I now regret the choices I made in those difficult and dark times.’

Here it comes, the big grass-roots appeal: ‘The bewilderment caused to the public about recent revelations has been deeply upsetting for me and others near and dear to me. To them and to the Irish people, I offer my apologies.’

And that’s it. Labour and Fine Gael are left flummoxed. The Taoiseach should have said what he did was wrong, sniffs Enda Kenny. Pat Rabbitte acidly comments that Bertie would have us believe he took gifts from strangers and loans from friends . . .

We should have known it was going to be boring when we saw the official description on the Dáil order paper: ‘Statements on disclosures relating to the Mahon Tribunal.’

And then we remember that old footage of Bertie delivering the 1993 Budget, shown a lot in the last week. Yes, there’s that sole black mark against him. Right on his forehead, in fact. An unmistakable smudge for Ash Wednesday.

It was indeed a dark time.

4 October

Who does Bertie do his banking with? Friends First. The apparent low-key public attitude to the political crisis—a lack of instant jokes for one thing—suggests the affair may be playing itself out.

Fine Gael spindoctor Ciaran Conlon is rueful at the popular perception that ‘they’re all the same,’ as if it’s not worth talking about standards any more. Fianna Fáil is cynical in stoking that attitude, he suggests. ‘We say Charlie Haughey—they say Lowry. We say Ray Burke—they say Lowry. We say Liam Lawlor—they say Lowry. We say Beverley Flynn—they say Lowry. We say Pádraig Flynn—they say Lowry . . .’

Bertie closes down Leader’s Questions today, saying he isn’t going to stand up in the Dáil every day to re-hash his financial affairs. And the Opposition look like they’ve been well and truly scolded.

And then something happens.

It involves the man at the urinal.

His name is Michael Wall. He was at the Manchester dinner where Bertie got £8,000, and then three years later Bertie got his house off the very same chap. Mr Wall, a Manchester-based retired owner of a coach-hire firm, sold the Taoiseach the house he now lives in, at 44 Beresford Avenue, off Griffith Avenue in Dublin 9.

Mr Ahern only named two people in the Dáil who were at the dinner, one of them dead. He did not name Michael Wall, even though three years later he would buy his house from the man. This house revelation, on
RTE
radio’s ‘Drivetime’ show, lusciously recounted by investigative reporter Philip Boucher-Hayes, is truly bizarre. Moreover, both Labour and Fine Gael explicitly say so. Michael McDowell, who had asked Bertie for a full list of attendees, didn’t even get the one closest to home, as it were.

The
PD
s are said to be ‘considering this information’ overnight, no doubt wondering whether they have just had their noses rubbed in it again by Fianna Fáil.

5 October

A big row between McDowell and Bertie is all the talk of Government Buildings. Bertie has to come into the Dáil on a Thursday for the first time in this administration—to take an Order of Business that the Tánaiste and
PD
leader was originally scheduled for.

McDowell doesn’t even sit in the chamber, fuelling talk of a deepening rift. But the Taoiseach is in confident, even buoyant, mood. He confirms that Michael Wall sold him his own four walls. He says he rented the house for two years—moving into it in 1995, just a year after the Manchester dinner.

He reveals he was talking to Michael Wall three times over the previous weekend in a bid to recollect who was in Manchester, but didn’t mention him in the Dáil—despite the bizarre house link—because Mr Wall ‘didn’t eat the dinner.’ He attended the function only in his official capacity as minibus driver to the Taoiseach and his mates . . . If he was in the bar (‘eating a packet of peanuts,’ as
RTE
political correspondent David McCullagh said straight-faced on air), then he wasn’t officially in attendance. Bertie is off the hook.

Except he isn’t. Michael McDowell is understandably feeling that he has been talking to the wall too. He demanded the Taoiseach identify those in attendance, and Bertie doesn’t even mention that he had significant financial dealings with the bloke who drove the bus . . .

So here we are: Bertie called the original
Irish Times
story ‘off the wall’. Now it turns out he bought his house ‘off the Wall’—and that’s only at the very fringes of an overall crisis in trust. The Taoiseach has been repeatedly offering distractionary material in his answers ‘for completeness’—and sending the media diving down culs de sac—but he didn’t mention his house in ‘completeness.’ Even though he now tells the Dáil that the Mahon Tribunal has been investigating his house, and that a file on his house has been sent to them . . .

Mr Ahern also says that he believes the former Tánaiste, Mary Harney, ‘would have been aware that I got loans from friends.’ Her spokesman instantly and categorically denies this. It is ‘mistaken’ and ‘untrue’. The question arises now as to whether the
PD
s are going to seek humiliation for Bertie in asking him to correct the record of the House. Fianna Fáilers are saying they can go whistle. Bertie’s not going back in.

The stand-off is eased in the afternoon when Harney does a doorstep and says the Taoiseach can’t have meant what he actually said. She knew he was interacting with the tribunal, he told her during the summer about a forgery attempt to link him with a bank in Mauritius, but he certainly didn’t say anything about loans from friends.

She rejects a claim by Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, the Sinn Féin leader in the Dáil, that she decided to get out of the leadership because she had been told by
Irish Times
editor Geraldine Kennedy what was ‘coming down the tracks’. It’s not true, she says, ending a rumour that had been doing the rounds in Leinster House almost as soon as ‘Bertiegate’ erupted.

The rest of the
PD
s stay totally silent all day. Their spokespersons say ‘no comment’ when anything is asked of them. Speculation rises inevitably that they may be preparing to pull the plug. Fianna Fáil backbenchers and even Ministers are bullish, prepared to open the door for them if they want to walk. They think they can stay in power with Independents.

RTE
notes that Bertie Ahern holds the record for being the shortest-serving Tánaiste in history, at 27 days. Michael McDowell has been Tánaiste for 22.

6 October

Former Labour leader Ruairí Quinn mocks Michael McDowell, his Dublin South-East constituency colleague, as ‘erratic’ on ‘Morning Ireland’. Yesterday’s events effectively mean that the Justice Minister has marched his Yorkists up to the top of the hill for the second time in a week. Either way of getting them off again literally involves ‘downside’ for the Tánaiste. It can either be further humiliation or departure from Government.

At lunchtime Mr McDowell says he is ‘working to restore relations with Mr Ahern,’ which is a small slice of a pie made without any pride ingredients. Bertie confirms in Limerick that he hasn’t spoken to the Tánaiste since he appeared in the Dáil.

McDowell says the Government is safe if the damage that has recently been done is repaired. He plans to meet Bertie over the weekend. ‘The two parties have been very careful not to say things to aggravate the situation,’ he manages, while the damage has been caused by ‘events’.

10 October

McDowell is putting up with the smell of putrefaction in Government, with Labour in particular taunting him that he’s ‘no Desmond O’Malley’ [the founder of the
PD
s]. Fine Gael are meanwhile slapping up posters of McDowell’s face in Dublin South-East with a line about single party Government that says: ‘Thanks to him, it’s a reality.’

The
PD
leader responds with a sudden appearance alongside the Taoiseach on the red carpet inside Government Buildings, announcing they’ve just cobbled together a plan to strengthen the Ethics Acts by making people intending to take money from friends ask the Standards in Public Offices Commission first.

Brian Lenihan said taking a bag of dough would be ‘unthinkable,’ but Mac is making it thinkable—and all the important thinking about it will have to be done for a witless politician in that position by the
SIPO
, a many-headed quango. It’s patently ridiculous.

The hacks and cameras are given 18 minutes to get to Merrion Street for this impromptu love-in between Bertie and his re-enamoured bride. Panting, brows beaded with perspiration, they are then lectured by McDowell.

The Irish people have a far more intelligent grasp of the issues, their importance, their implications and the options flowing from them than the small minority of commentators who have called for the dissolution of this Government. It is reassuring to note that all the evidence suggests that the substantial majority of the public want the Progressive Democrats to remain part of that Government and that they back the Taoiseach to remain in office and me to continue as his Tánaiste at this important juncture. I want to take this opportunity to reject as completely untrue the suggestion that there were angry exchanges between myself and the Taoiseach . . . There have never been any angry words between myself and the Taoiseach in the last seven years—or indeed before. I want to put on the record the simple truth that the Taoiseach and I asked our respective parties to refrain from public comment for a short period to assist us in repairing the damage done to the Government by recent events.

Only the
PD
s complied with that one.

Next comes a major blooper. After the
TV
lights switch off, the Taoiseach and Tánaiste having taken only four questions—all directed at McDowell—the two men stage a handshake for photographers. But the mikes remain on, and they pick up Mac muttering to Bertie through gritted teeth: ‘We survived it.’