The full text of the speech by Labour leader, Eamon Gilmore, on the Motion of No Confidence in An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern
A Ceann Comhairle
It gives me no pleasure to speak on this motion.
I entered politics and sought election to this House, because I hold firm convictions about the type of country I want Ireland to be. I have many political differences with the Taoiseach and his party, because I have a different view of what Irish society can be. I would far rather debate those matters - matters of policy and principle, than of conduct and character.
I acknowledge the contribution that the Taoiseach has made to public life, and I have no desire, and no intention, of taking any interest in his, or any body else's, personal affairs.
It is the Taoiseach's own actions that have made this motion necessary.
Let us be clear why the Taoiseach is facing a motion of confidence today.
One year ago, information came into the public domain about the Taoiseach's personal finances, and transactions that were being investigated by the Mahon Tribunal. The Taoiseach came into his House, and offered a strange account of monies received in Manchester and in Dublin. He indicated his firm intention of accounting for himself at the Tribunal, and appealed for the time and opportunity to do so. No one was more eager than he, he then claimed, for the opportunity to account for himself at the Tribunal.
He appealed for the sympathy of the nation, claiming that these transactions occurred at a difficult time in his life.
In large measure, he received that sympathy, and he was given that time.
Last April, when more information appeared, he again said that he would explain all to the Tribunal.
Throughout the election campaign, he constantly repeated the mantra that he would explain all at the Tribunal.
We gave him that opportunity, often in the face of criticism. We gave him that time. We waited for that explanation.
And that explanation is not credible.
We have had four days of evidence at the Tribunal, and the Taoiseach's story is simply not believable
It transpires that the transactions discussed here last year were only part of a broader picture. The evidence last week focused on no-fewer than five transactions involving large amounts of foreign currency in a thirteen month period in 1994 and 1995.
It transpires that far from being eager to appear at the Tribunal, the Taoiseach was delaying and frustrating its work.
It transpires that the total amount of monies under discussion in these transactions amounts to almost three hundred thousand Euro in today's terms. These are substantial sums of money, for which the Taoiseach cannot credibly account.
Therein lies the kernel of the problem. His failure to offer a credible account.
After 18 hours in the witness box, giving sworn testimony, the Taoiseach has not offered a believable account of these transactions. After 18 hours of testimony, over four days, there are few who believe him.
I don't believe him. Most of his own Deputies don't believe him, and the public clearly doesn't believe him either.
I repeat. Eighteen hours of sworn testimony, given in front of a panel of three judges, and still no credible account of transactions involving large sums of money.
The Irish people have a large reserve of common decency. They will insist on fair play, and they will give a man time to account for himself. But they also have a large reserve of common sense.
They do not believe the bizarre and shifting tales that have been offered, of a former Minister for Finance, who deals in briefcases full of currency.
Of men you never met before, who suddenly give you cash
Of wads of foreign currency. Of trips to banks where the clerks don't count money.
I don't believe the Taoiseach can tell RTE and the Dail precisely how much money he received by way of 'goodwill' loan from each of several named donors in Drumcondra and that he has a signed acknowledgement to that effect from each of them; that he repaid the loans with interest calculated precisely on the figures he says he received; that he can repeat the same story to the tribunal; but that, when facts and figures have to be checked to see whether they tally with the record, he can now say that in fact neither he nor anyone else ever counted the money at all and it may have been something quite different.
I don't believe there is any possible explanation for the Taoiseach telling RTE and the Irish people that, at the time he was receiving dig-outs and whip-arounds, his £50,000 in savings was gone. When he is quite happy to tell the tribunal that in fact Ms Larkin lodged that £50,000 in cash savings in an account in her name on the 5th December, 1994.
I don't believe the Taoiseach can say he is certain he acquired £30,000 in sterling, in order to return it in one lump sum to Micheal Wall, without even the vaguest recollection as to which bank he bought it in, whether he bought it in one lump sum or a series of smaller amounts - or even whether he bought it himself or asked a team of others to do so for him.
I don't believe anyone, no matter what their line of business, travels overseas with £30,000 in cash, leaves it in a hotel wardrobe while they go out on the town and then delivers that amount to a private couple, for domestic purposes, without any one of the parties being in the slightest bit surprised, thinking anything was otherwise than 'normal' - or even bothering to check how much cash was involved in this bizarre transaction.
I don't believe that he can't tell us the date of the mystery dinner in Manchester; that he cannot yet identify anyone who attended the dinner expect for one man who is now dead, and the man who didn't eat the dinner, because he was driving the bus. This from a man who claimed on the Late Late show in 1998 that one of his best attributes was a good memory.
The Irish people have a large reserve of good humour, but they won't be taken for fools.
The reality is that the Taoiseach, far from co-operating with the Tribunal delayed it.
The reality is that the Taoiseach has changed and re-changed his story, explaining the explanations, in an attempt to explain away what few records exist.
There were a lot of strange things happening in the Irish banking system in the 1980s and 1990s, but one thing they did do was count the cash at the end of the night, and keep records of currency transactions.
We can stay here all night and into the morning, pouring over the detail of the Taoiseach's finances. That is not the issue. The issue is his failure to offer a credible account of himself and the political consequences that flow from that failure. The issue is that he is not believed.
The Constitution gives this House the duty of electing a Taoiseach and of holding him to account. We cannot shirk that duty. We cannot sub-contract it out to any Tribunal. It is for each Deputy to discharge that public duty in this public forum.
It is the function of the Tribunal to investigate the facts and to report. But it is the duty of this House to decide who should and should not be Taoiseach. Those who are suggesting that we should leave it to the Tribunal are playing for time. They are at best seeking to postpone for their own political convenience the decision which we are constitutionally obliged to make. They are seeking to contract out to the three Tribunal judges, the political judgement which members of this House are obliged to exercise themselves.
How can we have a situation, where the leader of a Government has given eighteen hours of sworn evidence, in front of three judges, which the people do not believe?
How can we have a situation where the Taoiseach's credibility has been shredded? Where his word is not believed.
How can we have a situation, where the leader of a Government is known to have taken large sums of money, from person or persons unknown? Unknown, because he now cannot say credibly where the money came from. Apparently, he no longer remembers!
As the Taoiseach himself said in this House in the debate on the McCracken report
"The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone'
How can you have a situation where the Taoiseach's motives are at least open to question, because he received large sums of money for which he will not account? Was Mr Wall a friend in need? an admirer? Or the owner of a bus company offering bus services in the liberalised UK market, when liberalisation of the Irish market was under active consideration? I don't know, and I can't know, because the Taoiseach has failed to offer a believable account.
The Taoiseach claims that the only issue on which he should be answerable to the Tribunal is the allegation that he received money from Owen O'Callaghan. That is not so. The Taoiseach himself, speaking in the Dáil in 1997, said
'The Government considers that following the money trail is the most efficient and effective way to progress this type of inquiry as witnessed by the great success of the Dunnes payments tribunal which adopted this approach'
If a Tribunal is to investigate an allegation of corruption, it must follow the money trail, and the person being investigated must offer a credible account of where large sums of money have come from.
Government Deputies of all parties, will come into the House and say that none of this matters. That the Taoiseach is a public servant. That he does not have a lavish life style. That what they claim are his successes in Government mean that his financial dealings should be ignored.
I do not dispute that he had achievements, or his record of public service.
But neither do I accept that these provide a blanket dispensation from the requirements imposed on holders of public office.
It was John Adams, second president of the United States, who said that
'A free people has an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the character and conduct of our leaders'.
This state was founded by men and women who knew the meaning of public service. In the turbulent times that gave birth to an independent Ireland, the founders of this state knew privation of all kinds. That first generation, who built the state, were driven by the ethic of public service. They embraced the principle, developed across Europe in the nineteenth century, that true democracy requires true public service. It requires that people in public life will act in the public interest. If we are to have Government of the people by the people, then the people must know that those who exercise power do so entirely for the people, and not on behalf of any private interest.
The people who founded this State, many of whose heirs are current members of this House, knew and understood that principle.
But when that generation retired, a new and less savoury element entered Irish politics. The men in mohair suits contained within their ranks those who saw public life as a route to private gain. The great principles of civic republicanism, where the republic is governed in the interests of all the people, were eroded. The culture of public service was polluted by a culture of greed.
I am not just referring to the people who we know took money. I am also referring to those who turned a blind eye.
The Taoiseach himself enunciated the doctrine of the blind eye, when he spoke at the funeral of the late Deputy Haughey. His theory is that the normal standards do not apply to the special few.
But the basis of a democracy is that there is no special few. Instead, the obligations imposed on those in public life are rightly greater than on private citizens.
We now know, some of the motivation behind that eulogy. But what of the motivation of other Government Ministers? Why have so many senior Ministers, who must know that the Taoiseach's account is not credible, continued to defend the indefensible?
This debate is not just about the money that one man was given or why. There is a great principle at stake here. The principle on which democratic governance in a free society is founded. I had understood that he PDs, were founded on those principles.
I had understood that democracy matters to the Greens. It would appear not. It would appear that the Greens have gone yellow.
Where now are the fulminations of the Green party deputies about corruption in Fianna Fáil, that we heard with such regularity in the last Dáil Deputies Sargent and Gormley were particularly prone to exciting themselves on this issue. Again and again, during the election, the Green party repeated its determination to clean up politics. None of that, it would appear, matters today.
It cannot but be a source of deep regret to those of us who support progressive politics, and standards in public life, that the Greens should have sold out so comprehensively, and so quickly.
But they cannot hide. Neither the Greens, nor the PDs, nor those in Fianna Fáil who adhere to the principles of the founders of their party.
Deputies in those parties cannot hide behind the Tribunal - it must take responsibility for assessing the suitability of the Taoiseach to remain in office.
Deputies cannot hide behind the ideal that these are the private affairs of a private man. The credibility of the Taoiseach is a matter of public importance.
You cannot hide behind his record - we all acknowledge his record. But there are records in the Allied Irish Bank for which he cannot account, and so his credibility is shredded.
You cannot hide either, from the scrutiny of people beyond these shores, who will look at how, we, the elected representatives of the people of Ireland, deal with this matter. In a global economy, they will look to the standards of probity that are applied here to day, and form their own conclusions.
Members of this House, and in particular of the Government parties, cannot delude themselves. You have a duty to act.
A duty to our country, and to politics itself. Duty is never without cost. But members of the Green Party, of the PDs, and indeed of Fianna Fáil, have a duty to ensure that the country has a Taoiseach in which this House, and the Irish people, can have confidence.