Hogan rejects claim on phone licence

MINISTER FOR the Environment Phil Hogan said it was “far-fetched” to claim his alleged attendance in a coffee shop as a backbench TD could have influenced the granting of the second mobile phone licence.

“The issues uncovered by the Moriarty tribunal are troubling and deserve serious consideration,” he said. “I am glad to have the opportunity to refute some of the issues of misinformation put out about me by persons who should know better.”

Mr Hogan was referring to the evidence he gave to the tribunal that he had no memory of meeting Denis O’Brien in mid-October 1995, days before the awarding of the licence to the businessman’s consortium. He said the meeting did not take place or, if it did, he had no recollection of being present.

He was responding at the time to evidence from businessman and Fine Gael trustee Mark FitzGerald, who said he was surprised when arriving for a scheduled meeting with Mr O’Brien at a restaurant to find Mr Hogan and another Fine Gael TD, the late Jim Mitchell, also there.

Mr Hogan told the Dáil yesterday he was a backbench TD at the time, having resigned a junior ministry following the inadvertent release of budget material some weeks before. He had no “hand, act or part” in the awarding of the licence.

He said Mr Justice Michael Moriarty had made no adverse comment regarding his evidence to the tribunal. “For the record, I should also further state he made no adverse finding or conclusion concerning me, which I know is a source of great disappointment to some people.”

Mr Hogan said that while Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin had criticised his evidence to the Moriarty tribunal, “he tends to forget evidence that he provided to the Mahon tribunal on 15th November 2007, when he said he had no recollection of being at a meeting with Bertie Ahern and Owen O’Callaghan in Government Buildings, despite the detail of the meeting being recorded in the former taoiseach’s departmental diary entry at the time”.

The Minister claimed that some Opposition TDs had tried to involve him in “guilt by association” because he had been an acquaintance of Mr Lowry’s for many years.

He said it was another political smear that he had access to the Moriarty report before its publication. This was another false statement.

Mr Hogan commended the judge’s “detailed and considered work”.