Tribunal inquires are not pointless and a waste of time and a waste of money. Certainly they cost more than they should do and certainly they have taken far too long, Vincent Browne.
Also the incompetence which has characterised their operation is a serious issue and there is doubt about the validity of any of the findings of the planning (ie the Flood and the Mahon) tribunal to date.
And then the questions about the recordings of private interviews are, to say the least, disquieting. But there are serious issues at stake and none more so than in this Quarryvale module now under way at the planning tribunal.
At the heart of this Quarryvale module is (or should be) the deprivation of an impoverished community of tens of thousands of people of the facilities associated with a town centre in favour of the enrichment of a handful of developers by the development of what is now the Liffey Valley site. This was and remains a major scandal and all those public officials engaged in that shameful enterprise deserve to be exposed and driven from public office forever.
This is by far the most serious of the allegations ever investigated by the planning tribunal. The Brennan and McGowan module, which revealed that Ray Burke had been receiving payments from that outfit for years before he became a minister, was serious enough but no community was done down by what happened. The JMSE module to do with the payment of £30,000 to Ray Burke - who was disadvantaged by that?
The Century module to do with the alleged bribing of Ray Burke again was a piece of codology (I acknowledge a bias here because the principal involved on behalf of Century Radio, Oliver Barry, was and is a close friend but I believe the findings of the tribunal were grossly unfair and wrong and that there was no bribery or wrongdoing there at all). The Carrickmines module seems to me to amount to very little - again, who was disadvantaged?
But Quarryvale is different.
That whole enterprise to switch the centre of development from Neilstown to Liffey Valley was outrageous and the person who was involved in that at the outset, Tom Gilmartin, has been given immunity from prosecution, which says something about the focus of the tribunal. It was the abandonment of the people of Neilstown and north Clondalkin that is and was the issue here.
It would have been disastrous had the planning (aka Mahon) tribunal been required to abandon this inquiry as it has been required to abandon other inquiries because of its own staggering incompetence. Happily that is not the case and, one presumes, we will find out why that injustice was perpetrated.
And along the way we will find out whether there are any plausible explanations for the very curious transactions in relation to the bank accounts of Bertie Ahern and his then partner, Celia Larkin, in 1994 and 1995. It seems to me implausible that he ever got any monies from Owen O'Callaghan, the Cork developer who came in on the Liffey Valley, Quarryvale enterprise at a point when the dark deed had been done - ie the abandonment of the people of Neilstown, north Clondalkin. But we will find out, I assume.
And along the way we might find out whether Bertie has any vaguely credible explanation for the curious transactions to do with his bank account and the renting/purchase of his house at Beresford Avenue, Drumcondra.
If it transpires Bertie got no monies from Owen O'Callaghan then he and his counsel are right, it is none of the tribunal's business where he got the money or what the transactions were about. But it is the business of the rest of us.
It is not good enough that huge amounts of money (as they were at the time) would flow into and out of the bank accounts of the person who right at that time was about to become our taoiseach without there being an explanation for what was going on.
If there were unexplained deposits into these accounts then if they did not come from Owen O'Callaghan where did they come from and for what?
The claims that £80,000 was intended in early December 1994 to be spent on the refurbishment of a four-year-old house, valued at the time at about £130,000, that Bertie Ahern was merely going to rent, strains credulity. It is also difficult to believe that in a period of about 10 months during which he would have earned about £38,000 in salary he would have saved nearly £30,000. There are also the curiosities of the lodgments of random amounts in Irish punt terms representing exactly round-figure dollar amounts.
Of course we should have had all this out before the election for it is indeed a valid issue for the people to know whether the person who has served 10 years as taoiseach and who was seeking a mandate for another five years was above board. But a combination of media and Opposition loss of nerve caused this issue to recede. (If we don't care a toss whether our politicians are honest or not why bother with tribunals at all?)