Mr Charles Haughey said yesterday that from 1976 he had been pilloried for helping to install sewerage works for his Baskin cottage neighbours, and it had entered folklore that he had in some way gained from it.
He said it had been repeated again and again as if he had in some way used his influence to have the sewerage put in for his own benefit. This was incorrect.
Mr John Coughlan SC, for the tribunal, read bank minutes of a meeting dated December 8th, 1976. It was stated that Mr Haughey proposed the following year to sell 30 to 40 acres of Abbeville at £10,000 an acre. In this connection the county council was already running a sewerage scheme across a portion of his lands. He had had consultations with it regarding the expansion of the scheme, with a view to catering for a larger development within the area. Mr Haughey was confident that planning permission would be obtained.
Mr Haughey said there was an estate of houses beside Abbeville with no sewerage. The county council was anxious to put in sewerage.
The council asked if he would sell it a site for a treatment works and provide wayleaves across Abbeville lands to take the outfall from the treatment works into a stream which ran through Abbeville.
"Because they were my neighbours, I said to the county council I will give you the site for nothing and will not charge you for the wayleaves, and that was the basis of that piece of sewerage work being put into the Abbeville land," Mr Haughey said.
The tribunal was also told that a limit of £350,000, by way of an overdraft working account and loan accounts, was put on Mr Haughey in January 1977, but by April that year his total debt to the AIB was more than £401,000. Mr Coughlan referred to a document which set out that Mr Haughey's debt was £187,000 in September 1975; £273,000 in June 1976; £305,000 in September 1976; and £341,000 at the end of 1976. The total debt had risen to £401,929.77 by April 5th, 1977.