The Mahon tribunal's scrutiny of Bertie Ahern's personal finances brought into focus the former taoiseach's capacity for truculence and self-pity. Whatever its findings, Ahern's resentment is likely to remain for the rest of his days, writes Colm Keena, Public Affairs Coresspondent.
WHEN HE finished his evidence on Tuesday afternoon the Mahon Tribunal chairman Judge Alan Mahon thanked Bertie Ahern for his attendance over the past year or so, and said that hopefully he wouldn't have to be called back again to the witness box. It is not expected that he will be.
Ahern responded with one of his trademark utterances, full of incomplete sentences, unfinished thoughts, and allusions to his sense that he's been treated unfairly.
"Well chairman, if I can just say to you, as I have said many a time, I spent a lot of time dealing with you all, and at times I have felt a lot of the issues from counsel for the tribunal, my good friend Mr O'Neill, were always picked out to try and trap me and trick me and everything else, but I'd like to end on a friendly note, but repeat that I never, in my public life, took a bribe, backhander or anything else, from anybody, not to mind the individuals. And I have no doubt that in the hard job you have to do, to take all of the evidence, I have had to deal with it for 8½ years, a concerted campaign by a few people about this issue, who did everything they could to damage me, but I did my best in front of this tribunal to tell the full truth."
It has been a bruising encounter not just between Ahern and the tribunal but also between his former government and the tribunal, his party and the media, and the tribunal and the media. At the core of the battle was Ahern's hugely successful public image, his key to high office and power, and the threat the tribunal's probing represented to that image.
THREE YEARS AGOAhern was the politician the public loved the most, the taoiseach whose modest tastes and devotion to his work were legendary. The encounters with the tribunal and the media, however, brought into focus the man's capacity for truculence and self-pity, created suspicions about his honesty and capacity for deviousness, and made people worried that the man who was famously uninterested in personal gain, might in fact have been in receipt of improper payments while holding high office.
The "hard job" now falls to Judge Mahon, and his two colleagues, Judge Gerald Keys and Judge Mary Faherty. Their report, likely to emerge some time next year, must tell the public what they have made of the huge amount of evidence, confusion, claim and counter-claim. They must form an opinion using the civil standard of proof, or on the balance of probabilities. All three were appointed judges just as they were appointed to the tribunal, and except for occasional sittings in court they will be making the first "judgments" of their careers in a report that must absolve or otherwise a man who has been the pre-eminent politician of his generation.
At the height of the crisis caused by the tribunal's inquiries, Ahern and his then vocal supporters in Fianna Fáil argued there was no evidence against him, and that the holding of public hearings into his personal finances was therefore unjustified. In support of this contention it can be said that the public inquiry into Ahern's personal finances took place over 11 days, while the questioning concerning the allegations made against him was completed in just two days - Monday and Tuesday of this week.
On the other hand, the tribunal simply asked Ahern, by way of correspondence, to explain some large lodgements to his accounts in the period 1993-1995, a period during which the lodgements to his accounts exceeded his salary by more than a factor of two. If he had been able to explain the lodgements to the tribunal's satisfaction, that might have been the end of it. But the tribunal had to threaten to subpoena Ahern before it got any answers, the answers it got were convoluted and bizarre, and as the tribunal probed the answers changed. Most strikingly of all, records retrieved from bank and building society archives conflicted with the version of events Ahern had given by way of correspondence and by way of sworn evidence.
Matters came to a head when documents from the archives of Irish Permanent showed that lodgements worth £23,450 (Irish pounds) he had made to his and his daughters' accounts, which he said in evidence had come from his salary, had been in sterling cash.
On the day he was to explain to the Dáil how this could be the case, he called a press conference on the steps of Government Buildings and announced his intention to resign. That was in April. When he returned to the witness box in June he was a former taoiseach. He told the tribunal some of the sterling came from backing horses in England and from savings of sterling for a deposit on a property in Manchester, which in the event he never bought.
The sterling, he said, had been in his safe along with the £54,000 in Irish cash he'd also saved, but he'd forgotten all about it until his memory had been triggered by the documents from the building society archives. When he first mentioned horses, people in the public gallery laughed.
SO MUCH FORhis personal finances. The allegations against Ahern come from developer Tom Gilmartin. He alleges he was told by his one-time partner, developer Owen O'Callaghan, that O'Callaghan had given money to Ahern. Ahern was allegedly given £50,000 in return for helping to secure Dublin Corporation land that formed part of the site where the Quarryvale (now Liffey Valley) centre was to be built. He was also given money for a decision to grant tax designation to land at Golden Island, Athlone, owned by O'Callaghan. And he was given £30,000 for blocking tax designation for a rival town centre being built at Blanchardstown at the same time that Quarryvale was being developed. O'Callaghan and Ahern said no such payments occurred.
There is little evidence to support the allegation that Ahern got the alleged £50,000 payment, though Ahern accepts that Gilmartin contacted him to seek his help in relation to the Corporation land. Gilmartin gave a few versions of the alleged £30,000 payment, but in essence he said he was at a meeting in AIB Bankcentre, where O'Callaghan assured him and others that Blanchardstown would not be getting tax designation. When Gilmartin asked how he could be so sure, O'Callaghan said he had been told by Ahern, who was minister for finance at the time. After the meeting, according to Gilmartin, O'Callaghan told him he'd had to pay Ahern £30,000.
O'Callaghan met Ahern in the Department of Finance on March 24th, 1994. The developer's evidence is that at the meeting Ahern assured him that neither Blanchardstown nor Quarryvale would be getting designation. Ahern does not recall the meeting but accepts O'Callaghan's evidence. O'Callaghan said he then reported back on his conversation with Ahern, to a meeting in the AIB Bankcentre.
The inquiry into Ahern's finances shows £30,000 was deposited to his accounts on April 25th, 1994. Asked on Tuesday if this deposit had anything to do with his meeting with O'Callaghan a month earlier, Ahern said "Absolutely not."
Ahern told the earlier hearings into his personal finances that the money came from his accumulated cash savings, which he kept in his personal safes. He gave the cash to bank official Philip Murphy in St Luke's, and Murphy brought it to AIB O'Connell Street. The money was used to bring a special savings account Ahern had up to its statutory limit - £50,000. The money left over, £2,835.56, was lodged to Ahern's current account.
FRANK DUNLOP, Alobbyist and former director of elections for Fianna Fáil, was working for O'Callaghan on the Quarryvale project. His evidence has been that he made corrupt payments to councillors in furtherance of the project. He also lobbied Ahern in relation to O'Callaghan's affairs. When Ahern was being asked about Dunlop during Tuesday's evidence, he said: "I am just looking at the list of my diary references - I had only one meeting in the entire of 1994 with Mr Dunlop and that was on April 25th." This is the same date as the deposit. O'Neill didn't raise the matter with Ahern and nothing more was said about it.
Dunlop has said that as well as paying councillors he was also paying the late Liam Lawlor. Lawlor had a secret stake in a proposal to build a sports stadium in Neilstown, on the site where the town centre that ended up in Quarryvale was originally meant to be built. Lawlor's son, Niall Lawlor, was working with a US financial firm, Chilton and O'Connor, which was involved in the stadium project. Ahern met with representatives of the firm in the US and in Dublin.
On November 28th, 1994, a senior executive in Chilton and O'Connor wrote to Ahern congratulating him on his election as leader of Fianna Fáil. The executive, O'Callaghan and Dunlop had met with Ahern in his Department of Finance offices just 10 days earlier. Earlier in November Dunlop had met with executives from Chilton and O'Connor in New York while attending a Fianna Fáil fund-raising event. On the date the letter was written, everyone expected Ahern to be made taoiseach the following week. On Monday, December 5th, 1994, a large deposit was made by Ahern's then partner, Celia Larkin, to an account she opened in her name at AIB O'Connell Street. Ahern has said the cash deposited was sterling, but the bank records show that only a small amount of sterling was lodged to the branch on that day. However, an unusually large amount of non-sterling foreign cash was lodged, and the amount lodged by Larkin was the exact equivalent of $45,000 when one of the dollar exchange rates in use on the day is applied to the amount of Irish money that ended up in the account.
Asked about the lodgement, Ahern said it wasn't a bribe, and that extensive evidence had been given as to where the money came from.
In the event, Ahern didn't become Taoiseach, John Bruton did. Ahern was Minister for Finance up to December 15th, 1994. On December 14th, in one of his last acts before he left office, he signed a statutory instrument assigning tax designation to O'Callaghan's site at Golden Island, Athlone. The instrument was also signed by the outgoing minister for the environment, Michael Smith. Ahern told O'Neill that he cleared a lot of items in his office that day and that the Department of the Environment wanted the instrument signed. He continued: "To the day I die, Mr O'Neill, I never got a penny from any of these characters. The only sad thing is that I ever met any of them."
Whatever its findings, Ahern's resentment of the Mahon tribunal is likely to hang over him for the rest of his days.