St Luke’s in Drumcondra – once Bertie Ahern’s political power base – now serves as the former taoiseach’s office. But a Fianna Fáil constituency rival, Cllr Mary Fitzpatrick, is asking questions about the property
WHAT DO YOU DO when you’ve stepped down as taoiseach, retired from the Dáil and more or less disappeared from public view? If you’re Bertie Ahern, it seems, you develop a reluctance to give up your constituency headquarters.
St Luke’s, in Drumcondra in Dublin, was bought in 1988 for £56,000 and renovated so that it could be used as a constituency centre for Ahern. It became the centre of his power base, where many key decisions, of both local and national interest, were made during his years as a TD and as taoiseach.
The building, and the cost of operating it, became the focus of inquiries by the Mahon Tribunal in 2008, as Ahern was fighting desperately to cling on to power, and looks now to become the focal point for bitter divisions within the constituency.
Ahern told The Irish Times that he moved most of his material from Government Buildings to St Luke’s when he retired from politics, and that one of his paid assistants is now working full-time on documenting and logging the material, which is being donated to an educational institution. The documents dealing with Northern Ireland alone would take a year to log, he said.
Ahern says he uses one room in St Luke’s for this purpose. “The rest of it is available for the next generation of the party and for all of the organisation. I’m doing other bits and pieces so I just drop in and drop out.”
Constituency officers say there are no plans at present to move ownership of the building from the three trustees who hold it in trust for the party organisation in Dublin Central. All three are key figures of Ahern’s former “Drumcondra mafia” group, and two have never been members of the party.
The party’s only elected representative in the constituency, Cllr Mary Fitzpatrick, does not hold clinics there. Fitzpatrick has recently asked for details of the ownership, use and costs of running St Luke’s. She wants to know as well about the constituency organisation’s finances, a topic that was also a focus of the Mahon tribunal’s inquiries into Ahern.
St Luke’s is “a monument to all that is wrong with the party” and needs to be dealt with if the party’s fortunes are to be revived in the constituency, says one local party member who does not want to be named.
But Ahern “hates to surrender anything”, particularly a property as valuable as St Luke’s, in the view of Royston Brady. The former lord mayor of Dublin, who fell out with Ahern some years ago but whose family are long-time supporters of the former taoiseach, says Ahern has only recently resigned himself to the fact that he is “finished” in politics.
THE FIANNA FÁIL leader, Micheál Martin, has called for party-renewal committees to be established in every constituency. Dublin Central’s is chaired by Cllr Fitzpatrick, whose father, Dr Dermot Fitzpatrick, was a TD for the constituency. Other members include long-time Ahern supporters, such as Chris Wall, constituency chairman Prof Tommy Cooke and constituency organiser Liam Cooper.
Dominic Dillane, the branch treasurer, told The Irish Times that the constituency has about €50,000 on deposit. Much of this money is in two bank accounts that the Mahon tribunal probed in public hearings. The Ahern supporter and St Luke’s trustee Tim Collins was the sole signatory of one of them until 2008.
Collins, who has never been a member of Fianna Fáil, told the tribunal that the account (known as the B/T or building-trust account) contained political donations. Until the tribunal began to probe the account, it was outside the control of the constituency organisation.
Dillane says a mortgage on St Luke’s was cleared earlier this year, using money from the B/T account. He says that the account used to have “up to €80,000” but now had “about €30,000” on deposit.
Ahern’s former partner, Celia Larkin, was given £30,000 from the B/T account in 1993; using the money to buy a house in Phibsborough, Dublin, where some elderly relatives were living as tenants. Larkin repaid the money with interest in 2008.
Another account that featured at the tribunal has approximately €20,000 in it, Dillane says. This account has been holding money that arose from the sale of a former party premises on Amiens Street in the late 1980s.
Part of the proceeds of the sale went to Ahern’s organisation at the time, and has been on deposit ever since. Collins has nothing to do with this account.
The deed recording the sale of St Luke’s lists five Ahern supporters as the purchasers: Tim Collins, Des Richardson, Joe Burke, the late James Keane and the late Patrick Reilly (aka Paddy the Butcher). Richardson has never been a member of Fianna Fáil. None of the trustees is an elected officer of the constituency organisation.
It is not known exactly where the funds to buy and renovate St Luke’s, and pay stamp duty on the purchase, came from. The amount involved was most likely in excess of £100,000. The Mahon tribunal, in its partial examination of the constituency’s financial affairs, never identified an account from which the funds originated. The tribunal was told that the money came from donors who attended a meeting in the Gresham Hotel, Dublin, in late 1987, and agreed to fund the purchase. No mortgage was taken out at the time.
A mortgage registered in June 2000, against St Luke’s in favour of AIB, lists the owners of the property as being the five purchasers named above, as trustees of the Fianna Fáil Dublin Central constituency. The satisfaction of the mortgage has not been registered in the Registry of Deeds.
The constituency chairman, Tommy Cooke, says that he expects St Luke’s to become a resource not just for Fianna Fáil Dublin Central but also for the party organisations in neighbouring constituencies.
According to Cooke, the question of how the upkeep of the building would be paid is being examined. He says the issue of arranging for new people to act as trustees of St Luke’s is not on the agenda. Dillane says the subject had come up for discussion but no decision had been made.
CLLR FITZPATRICK says she cannot comment on what she believes should happen to St Luke’s until she receives the information the renewal committee has sought from the constituency officers. “I would like to get the facts and then I can form a view,” she says.
The ill-feeling between Fitzpatrick and the Ahern camp is well known. She was first elected to Dublin City Council in 2004 and was a candidate in the 2007 general election. On the morning of the poll, leaflets were dropped in to households in the constituency asking Fianna Fáil voters to vote 1, 2, 3, respectively, in favour of Ahern, Cyprian Brady (Royston’s brother) and Fitzpatrick. The leaflets said this was the party strategy “in this area”, but the same leaflet was dropped to all households in the constituency.
Fitzpatrick got 1,725 first preferences, while Brady polled just 939. However, Brady was elected when Ahern’s huge surplus brought him over the line ahead of Fitzpatrick.
In the 2009 local elections, Ahern’s brother, Maurice, a sitting councillor, sought re-election to the council and election to the Dáil in a byelection held on the same day. He lost in both efforts. Fitzpatrick got re-elected to the council on the first count.
Cyprian Brady and Fitzpatrick contested the 2011 general election in Dublin Central. Neither was elected, though Fitzpatrick got 3,504 first preferences as against Brady’s 1,637. When Brady’s elimination was announced at the count centre, one Fitzpatrick supporter was quoted as remarking: “We should put up a plaque. Here lies the Ahern machine, 1977 to 2011.”
However, the observation may have been premature. In June Brady was elected to the comhairle Dáil ceanntair in Dublin Central, to act as vice-chairman. It is understood that Ahern supporters still control the majority of the cumainn in the constituency.
A spokeswoman for Fianna Fáil head office says the party has no comment to make about St Luke’s. It has “no involvement with St Luke’s at all. It has nothing at all to do with the party. It is held by the trustees and it is not owned by the organisation,” she says.
Micheál Martin, who publicly criticised Ahern this week, is due to visit Dublin Central in the next few weeks, according to the spokeswoman, as part of his ongoing tour of constituency organisations.
Who owns St Luke's? The three surviving trustees
Des Richardson
Richardson is an engineer who became involved in running recruitment firms and in property investment. His business dealings included a partnership in the late 1990s with the lobbyist Frank Dunlop, who was later jailed for corruption.
A long-term fundraiser for Ahern’s Dublin Central machine, Richardson, who has never been a party member, was asked by Ahern to act as a special fundraiser for Fianna Fáil in 1993. He set up an independent operation, working out of an office in the Berkeley Hotel in Dublin.
Richardson continued to work as a fundraiser for the party after Ahern took over as party leader.
Richardson gave evidence to the Mahon tribunal, saying that he was one of the organisers of, and a contributor to, the “digouts” for Ahern that the tribunal was told occurred in 1993 and 1994.
Tim Collins
Collins is a former owner of a tiling business and a small architectural practice who became a key figure in Ahern’s fundraising operations in Dublin Central. He was the sole operator of the B/T or building-trust account in the Drumcondra branch of Irish Permanent, from which Celia Larkin was given £30,000 in 1993 and to which £20,000 sterling was later lodged. Collins said to that the account held political donations.
Lodgments to the account ended in 1995 when new regulations were enacted about the treatment of political donations.
Collins operated as a land scout in the 1990s and made substantial profits from property deals in the Dublin area. He made a large profit from the sale to the State of a site that became the official Battle of the Boyne visitor centre. Allegations by Frank Dunlop that Collins made corrupt payments to councillors to secure planning changes to land owned by clients of Collins, and that Collins knew of these payments, were rejected by Collins.
Collins was never a party member and said he stopped working for the party in Dublin Central in the mid-1990s.
Joe Burke
Burke is a former neighbour of Bertie Ahern’s from Artane, Dublin. He is a former Dublin city councillor and deputy lord mayor. His pub-refurbishment business, JH Burke Sons Ltd, went into liquidation in December 2006 with debts of some €2.3 million.
Burke was appointed chairman of Dublin Port Authority by the Ahern government in 2002. He resigned from the position in 2009.
Burke was a contributor to one of the digouts that the Mahon tribunal was told were organised for Ahern.
He said a £20,000 sterling lodgment to the B/T account in 1994 was money withdrawn in Irish cash from the account for use on St Luke’s but not used for that purpose. When he came to repay the money, he used sterling he had in his safe and which he had intended to use in England buying bric-a-brac for his pub-renovation business. He said he would have left the cash in an envelope in St Luke’s for Tim Collins to collect and lodge.
