There is very good reason for counsel for Bertie Ahern to complain about the conduct of the planning tribunal. There is very good reason for the rest of us to be concerned about the further revelations concerning Ahern's finances, writes Vincent Browne.
Unless members of the tribunal were completely cut off from what was happening around them, they must have realised there would be a general election some time in May or early June. Knowing that, they must have appreciated they could not proceed with their inquiries into allegations concerning Ahern, since there could not be a reasonable opportunity for the Taoiseach to defend himself at the tribunal against allegations that would be made in an updated opening statement on this Quarryvale module and in the early evidence.
Given that knowledge, to have circulated to several people to appear before the tribunal the transcripts of Ahern's private interviews with the tribunal last April was, at best, an act of recklessness, since they would have or should have known full well there was a probability these would be leaked.
This is just one of many questions that arise about the conduct of the tribunal generally and there is a possibility that further revelations about past conduct may scuttle the tribunal's proceedings entirely and even lead to the overturning of its findings to date. And this is not because some new, unanticipated legal technicalities have been thrown in the way of the tribunal's investigations by the courts.
I have dealt with some of these issues in this column before but allow me to rehash some of the more elementary matters.
The tribunal failed to disclose information that would undermine the credibility of witnesses making allegations damaging to the reputations of others.
For instance, it failed to draw attention in public to the fact that allegations made in public session by Tom Gilmartin - that Owen O'Callaghan and his solicitor, John Dean, had falsified a contract made by Gilmartin and O'Callaghan - directly contradicted what Gilmartin said in private sessions.
The manner in which tribunal lawyers conducted private sessions with some of the tribunal's key witnesses, notably Gilmartin and Frank Dunlop, also raises serious questions. For instance, Gilmartin was informed that if he were to insist that the £50,000 he allegedly gave to Pádraig Flynn in 1989 was a personal donation, it could be inferred this was a bribe, whereas if he said he intended this money to go to Fianna Fáil it might be assumed to have been a proper political donation.
Similarly the remark to Dunlop that if, hypothetically, he had received £150,000 from somebody in connection with a development and he retained £75,000 of this for himself and had disbursed the remaining £75,000 to councillors, then he would be liable in tax only for the £75,000.
Conor Maguire was right to raise the question as to why the tribunal was continuing to investigate allegations made by a person whose credibility as a witness seems to have been very seriously undermined, since several of the most serious of the allegations he has made concerning Owen O'Callaghan have been found to be baseless.
The question arises, could Gilmartin's evidence be relied upon at all and, if not, why is the tribunal pursuing its investigations arising from these allegations? Incidentally, the tribunal has stumbled across matters to do with Bertie Ahern's finances that probably have nothing at all to do with the tribunal's business, but which raise questions about what else the Taoiseach was up to at the time, viz in 1994, when he was minister for finance.
The reason this has arisen at all is simply because in its examination of the claim by Tom Gilmartin that Owen O'Callaghan paid Bertie Ahern £80,000 in 1994, the tribunal has asked to see Ahern's financial records and this has led to some bizarre discoveries.
The first is that Ahern operated no bank account from 1987 to 1994 and retained no financial records of any kind during this period. For long stretches from 1987 to 1995 he retained huge amounts of cash in his safe in his constituency office at a time when he might have been able to earn significant interest had he deposited these amounts in a building society account. And he continued to hoard large amounts of cash long after his matrimonial affairs were settled in the High Court in November 1993.
Then there is the curious "dig-outs" he got from his friends, both here and in Manchester and, surprisingly, all these "dig-outs" were made by way of cash, for the most part large amounts of cash. For instance, we now have learnt that the £8,000 he got in Manchester in October 1994 came by way of large bank notes from six people, who spontaneously did a whip-around at a dinner and all of whom happened to have had more than a thousand pounds sterling each in cash in their pockets. In the immediate aftermath of his spectacular electoral success it is truly extraordinary that four days afterwards Bertie Ahern should be plunged back into another crisis. But that's politics and events.