Ben Dunne was a man of his time. The years leading up to the businessman’s fall from grace in 1992 was a period when the unhealthy nexus between business and politics in Ireland reached its apogee and was at its most corrosive for democracy.
In many ways the most remarkable thing about the news stories that emerged in 1996 about payments to Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry by Ben Dunne was that they could not be ignored. The government was forced to act and established the McCraken tribunal. By then, the public mood demanded it.
Thirteen years earlier the Irish Press had reported that Haughey – the then leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach – owed AIB £1 million. AIB issued a carefully worded denial and the paper retracted its story. The Moriarty tribunal – which followed McCracken – found the Irish Press story to be true. AIB had written off some of the debt.
Something changed for the better in Irish public life during the intervening period, which was one marked by a series of business scandals involving politicians, state assets and senior business figures. The seeds of the far-too-cosy relationship between business and politics had been sown in the 1960s when the two dominant parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, set about courting business and seeking financial support.
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By the 1980s the lines were so blurred that Haughey’s personal financial advisor, Des Traynor, was chairman of one of the country’s largest companies, CRH and ran an offshore banking operation for hundreds of wealthy Irish people from its offices. Corruption in the planning process, meanwhile, was rife.
It is tempting to think that those days are behind us. There have been some significant reforms of the rules governing political donations and the funding of parties. The office of the director of corporate enforcement has been established.
But the legacy of that period is a long one. The temptation for those with wealth to try and influence politics to their advantage endures.