OPINION:At last, it's official: people give political donations not because of altruistic concerns for democracy but because they want an "in" with ministers - and Des Richardson has confirmed it, writes Fintan O'Toole.
LAST WEEK, I wrote a piece on these pages about Bertie, Steve Carson's television biography of Bertie Ahern. In the course of it, I quoted a line spoken in the documentary by Des Richardson, who raised money for Fianna Fáil and Bertie Ahern personally.
Discussing the circumstances of the first dig-out for Ahern, in which £22,500 was raised in December 1993, Richardson remarked that "If I wanted to raise £100,000 for Bertie Ahern, I could have done that in one week."
Shortly after my piece was published, I spoke to Richardson. He was concerned that, although this quote is accurate, it somewhat misrepresented what he had gone on to say in the full, unbroadcast parts of the interview he had given for the TV series.
This is not an unusual feeling. I've worked on enough television documentaries to know that only a fraction of the material recorded appears on screen and that a great deal of important material gets left out simply because the tight narrative structure has no room for it. I've also been interviewed for enough documentaries to know that sometimes the chosen soundbite doesn't represent precisely what you want to say.
In this case, though, and without any implied criticism of the makers of Bertie, the bit of Richardson's interview that ended up on the cutting-room floor seems particularly significant. It explains from the point of view of an insider in the business of political fundraising how the perception of an inside track can be as important as reality.
The context for what Richardson went on to say is reasonably straightforward. The most controversial component of the first dig-out for Ahern is a £5,000 bank draft from the then managing director of NCB Stockbrokers Pádraic O'Connor.
This donation is controversial for two reasons. It was generated within NCB through a false invoice. And, crucially, O'Connor denies that he was a friend of Ahern and that the money was meant for Ahern personally. Richardson, on the other hand, insists that O'Connor was a friend of Ahern's and that the money was always intended to be part of the personal dig-out.
In the interview he gave for Bertie, Richardson was trying to explain why his contention is true. His version of events is that he was trying to raise a specific amount of money (£20,000 to £25,000) and simply stopped when he had reached the target. He pointed out that he could have raised £100,000 in order to reinforce the contention that the money was raised for very specific purposes and was not an open-ended fundraising exercise on Ahern's behalf.
This much is clear from the interview with Richardson as it appears in the TV series. What does not appear in the series, though, is his explanation for precisely how he could have raised £100,000 in a week. It hasn't been possible for me to see the original footage of the interview, but Carson has confirmed to me that Richardson's recollection of what he went on to say is broadly accurate.
So here is Richardson's explanation for how he could have raised that huge sum for Ahern: "I could have raised £100,000 for Bertie in one week, and let me explain how. Pádraic O'Connor from NCB had given me £5,000 for Bertie. If I had gone to every stockbroker in Ireland and said 'Pádraic O'Connor/NCB has given me £5,000 for Bertie Ahern, who was minister for finance at that time, so I would like you to do likewise', in my view, they would have been falling over themselves to do so, just to maintain a 'perceived' level playing pitch for their company. It's all about perception."
It is important to say that Richardson did not, in fact, approach other stockbroking firms looking for donations to Ahern - the Mahon tribunal asked all of them if they had received such an approach and all replied in the negative.
It is also important to stress that his view of how such an approach would have been effective has to do with perception rather than reality. His contention is not that stockbrokers other than NCB would, in fact, have been at a disadvantage because NCB had given money to the serving minister for finance and they had not. It is that they would have feared such a disadvantage and felt it necessary to cough up money in order to maintain a level playing field.
This explanation, coming from perhaps the most effective political fundraiser of recent decades, is worthy of attention. Essentially, Richardson's view puts on the public record a firm contradiction of the bland assurances that companies and business people make political contributions solely because they want to support democracy.
It suggests that, even if their fears are, in fact, groundless, some companies pay up because they know their competitors are doing so and because they believe these payments will give their rivals an "in" with powerful ministers.
Far beyond the specific circumstances of the dig-out in 1993, this has implications for the whole system of political funding.