A mystery donor gave Mr Ray Burke £35,000 just a week before he received the controversial Murphys payment of £30,000 in June 1989, the former Minister for Foreign Affairs has told the Flood tribunal.
Mr Burke's revelation directly contradicts his Dail statement of September 1997 when he claimed that £30,000 was the "largest contribution" he had received during an election campaign.
At the time, only the Murphys payment was known, and it was generally assumed he had received one payment of £30,000. He was accused subsequently of misleading the Dail for not revealing that he had in fact received two payments for this amount, one from Murphys and another from Rennicks Manufacturing.
In total, Mr Burke received donations worth £117,000 in the three weeks before the 1989 election, he told the tribunal yesterday. Of this sum, £10,000 is known for certain to have been remitted to Fianna Fail headquarters.
On his second day in the witness-box in Dublin Castle, Mr Burke found himself correcting his remarks to the Dail in several respects. He admitted he was wrong to have said the £7,000 he paid to his local constituency organisation was paid in two drafts of £5,000 and £2,000. The word "drafts" was incorrect, but the sum actually understated his contribution, he said.
He admitted once more that the money from Murphys was not entirely in cash, as he told the Dail, but he denied that his statement indicated that the £10,000 he gave to Fianna Fail headquarters came from the Murphys payment, as it came from another source.
However, since this other source - Ren nicks - was not generally known, it was widely assumed at the time that Mr Burke was referring to the money from Murphys.
Asked by Mr John Gallagher SC, for the tribunal, why he chose not to reveal "the full story", Mr Burke said that was "as I chose to do it at the time". In the Dail, he was only answering questions about the Gogarty contribution.
His back to the press and his gaze fixed permanently on the chairman, Mr Justice Flood, Mr Burke was again in combative form in the witness-box. For example, when Mr Gallagher greeted him with a "good morning, Mr Burke" he replied pointedly: "Morning, chairman".
The sums moving into Mr Burke's account in the weeks before the 1989 election reveal an extraordinary level of generosity among political donors, to say the least. He lodged £39,500 on May 31st, came back with £13,100 a week later and lodged a further £23,000 three days later, on June 9th.
This last lodgment derived mostly from the £30,000 donation made by Rennicks, a subsidiary of Fitzwilton, the holding company controlled by Dr Tony O'Reilly and his family. From this money, Mr Burke drew the bank draft for £10,000 which he passed on to Fianna Fail headquarters.
At the same time, the financial drain of running an election campaign was not showing up in his bank overdraft with the Ulster Bank. This stood at about £12,000 at the time the election was called. By polling day, it had increased by no more than £500.
By August 1989, Mr Burke said he was in "financial straits" and he increased the overdraft to £35,000. He was "cash-strapped" because his political funding was on deposit with three and six-month withdrawal terms.
Further details of Mr Burke's accounts remain shrouded in mystery, however, as his lawyer, Mr Joe Finnegan SC, repeatedly sought to have the tribunal's inquiries restricted to the Murphys payment only.
In a 35-minute submission before the start of Mr Burke's evidence, Mr Finnegan again accused the tribunal of unfair procedures and claimed there were two types of witnesses, "tribunal witnesses" such as Mr Gogarty and "the accused" such as Mr Burke. The effect of his interventions was to rein in Mr Gallagher's questioning on financial matters.
The much-heralded questioning of Mr Burke regarding the Taoiseach's inquiries into his fitness for office in 1997 yielded little. A few weeks after the election in that year, he rang Mr Dermot Ahern, who had been sent by the Taoiseach to interview Mr Joseph Murphy jnr about the Burke allegations.
Mr Ahern told him that Mr Murphy had denied his company had paid Mr Burke money. In his evidence last May, Mr Ahern said Mr Burke's response was: "Well, who gave me the money? It must have been Bailey."
Yesterday, Mr Burke said this was a "throwaway remark". He repeated his certainty that the £30,000 came from Mr James Gogarty on behalf of JMSE, and not from the developer, Mr Michael Bailey.
Asked why he did not seek to have corrected a newspaper report which claimed that he got £30,000 from Mr Bailey, Mr Burke said he didn't want to give the report "the oxygen of comment" because things would "spin out of control".
He denied the allegation that he ever met the Taoiseach and Mr Bailey together. On the night he was appointed to Cabinet, the Taoiseach told him Mr Dermot Ahern had been to London to interview Mr Murphy. The Taoiseach also told Mr Burke that Mr Gogarty had been given immunity from prosecution, he said.
Mr Burke said he asked Mr Bailey to come to his home at the end of June 1997. The two men reviewed the meeting at which Mr Gogarty handed over £30,000 in 1989 and Mr Bailey suggested that Mr Gogarty could be "pacified" if he and Mr Joseph Murphy snr could be persuaded to sit down together and have a reconciliation.