The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Burke, emerged from the familiar environs of the Dail yesterday to announce that he had "drawn a line in the sand" and put the unseemly matter of his receipt of £30,000 from a construction company in 1989 behind him. It was a barefaced bluff. Mr Burke is not in a position to decide what should or should not happen in relation to this political controversy. That function is reserved for the Dail. And the terms of the new tribunal of inquiry have yet to be voted on by the Government and opposition parties.
Mr Burke has not adequately explained the circumstances surrounding his particular version of these events. He refused, point blank, to provide even general details of his fund-raising activities in 1989 and of his political expenditure in that and other general election campaigns. He stated that this was the largest single donation he had ever received. But he could not explain why he had received it; why it had been paid in hard cash by an individual he had never met before and why he had not contacted the company subsequently to confirm receipt of the money. Are we all to suspend completely our critical faculties? He argued that there was nothing untoward in what had happened; that no rules existed at that time concerning political donations and that no political favours had either been sought, or provided, on foot of the money. It was truly a wondrous time, when absolute strangers arrived at one's home, carrying bags of unsolicited banknotes.
If the Minister for Foreign Affairs had enjoyed an unblemished and controversy-free political career, his carefully prepared and extremely limited explanations might win him a conditional pardon. But he was the subject of a Garda investigation over financial payments and planning matters in 1974. Because of that, these latest allegations deserve more than a cursory examination by his Dail colleagues, if public concern concerning dubious political behaviour is to be allayed.
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, put a bold face on it in the Dail when he agreed with the McCracken Tribunal that a public representative should not be "under a personal financial obligation to anyone" while, at the same time, arguing the case for "legitimate political contributions". Mr Ahern found the report "extremely disturbing" in relation to Charles Haughey and Michael Lowry and he spoke of the need to clear up the past through the work of the new tribunal. But, while calling for the application of "the highest standards in our public life", and the "vigorous pursuit" of large-scale tax evasion, Mr Ahern defended the exclusion of the ownership of the Ansbacher accounts from detailed investigation.
Even before Mr Burke made his highly selective statement, the public was treated to the spectacle of a disgraced former Fine Gael minister, Michael Lowry, apologising to the Dail for misleading TDs last year in a prepared statement designed to clarify his particular financial problems. It was not a happy coincidence. The unwillingness of the Fianna Fail and Progressive Democrats Government to allow a preliminary investigation into Mr Burke's affairs by the new tribunal, as suggested by Democratic Left and the Green Party, is little short of sinister. The fact that neither Fine Gael nor the Labour Party has found it necessary to ask for such a limited inquiry, in order to reassure the public, is incomprehensible.