Chit-chat’ turns to heated exchange

Harry McGee, Political Editor

Sounds like a Brazilian samba from the 1950s, but it was all the fashion around Leinster House in the late 1980s.

An unsuspecting minister would be coming back to the Blue Corridor after Question Time. Another of the ministers would jump out from his or her room, usher in him or stop him on the corridor, and before you the visitor would know it, he'd be shaking hands with virtually the entire frontbench. And before he'd get a chance to draw breath, they'd have vamoosed back into the ether.

"Sessions like that would have taken place 20 times before breakfast," Taoiseach Bertie Ahern told the Mahon Tribunal yesterday. Later, he said they happened "on the hour every hour".

The Taoiseach wasn't slow to commend his good memory but there "wasn't a hope" that he'd remember something like that. They would call in. He would go out. "What I would do is just shake hands."

And so the conflict over the famous "meeting" that allegedly took place between Tom Gilmartin and senior Fianna Fáil ministers was finally cleared up yesterday. Well kind of. While still not accepting as a matter of possibility that any such interaction between Mr Gilmartin took place, Mr Ahern accepted a "chit-chat encounter" from now on defined as an informal meet-and-greet, hand-shaking kind of thing that's all over in second could have taken place.

If Mary O'Rourke had met him for a total of 10 seconds, then Bertie Ahern said that: "I was probably in five seconds before and left five seconds after."

But his acceptance that he and other ministers could very well have met or chit-chatted (that word must have been uttered a couple of hundred times yesterday) with Tom Gilmartin on the corridors of Dáil Éireann was still an important concession from the Taoiseach. His clear statement to the tribunal that he had a "firm belief" that no meeting took place with Mr Gilmartin was the one major issue in dispute. In the event, the Taoiseach accepted that it could have happened, but qualified it by saying that what could have happened was entirely different to the serious "meeting" that he assumed the tribunal and Tom Gilmartin had been talking about.

In a sense, a shift (both in the Taoiseach's position and in the definition of a "meeting") was inevitable given the clarity and strength of Ms O'Rourke's recollection on Monday.

But Mr Ahern said that when the tribunal had written to him in relation to a meeting, his impression was that it had meant a substantial, quantitative and qualitative meeting, a Cabinet meeting, or Government sub-committee meeting or a formal meeting of Cabinet. In accepting that he may have "met" Mr Gilmartin, he said that the meeting would have been almost of the type of saying hello to somebody passing through on the street. In fact, impatient at the tenor of some of the cross-examination later on, he intimated that a Tribunal of Inquiry would have more to do than to spend months and months inquiring into what amounted to triflings like chit-chat on Leinster House's blue corridor.

The fact that chit-chat meeting or encounter emerged as the headline phrase was a bit unfortunate. There was nothing chit-chatty or casual about the grilling he endured under the questioning of Tom Gilmartin's barrister, Hugh O'Neill, during his five-hours in the witness box.

Youngish and physically small, with a light voice, O'Neill had a slightly schoolboyish demeanour. But that meant nothing as he tore into the Taoiseach from the off and never relented during a gruelling, forensic and aggressive cross-examination that lasted for three hours and often left Mr Ahern on the back foot. The Taoiseach at times expressed his frustration with sharp impatient answers and with impatient rapping of his knuckles on the box. But yesterday, hHe encountered possibly his most uncomfortable period under fire since becoming Taoiseach in 1997.

From the perspective of the murky goings-on and shenanigans that surrounded Gilmartin's efforts to get Bachelors Walk and Quarryvale off the ground, the Taoiseach's reputation remained relatively unscathed.

There is no suggestion that any action of his was untoward, but that was not the point. What O'Neill succeeded in doing was: from the outset, he said Gilmartin had made no allegations against the Taoiseach and there was, therefore, no major gain to be had for him when saying he had met the Taoiseach four or five times.

The Taoiseach's legal team had adopted an aggressive stance towards Gilmartin from the start, especially when Mr Ahern's barrister, Conor Maguire, cross-examined him. Mr O'Neill returned that aggressiveness with interest yesterday. Within seconds of starting, he was asking Mr Ahern was it his view that Mr Gilmartin was "shifty" and "dishonest" as his counsel Conor Maguire had alleged. The Taoiseach found himself having to defend his legal team's trawl through Mr Gilmartin's past and its portrayal of him as shifty. No, he said, he did not agree that he was shifty or dishonest, but he pointed out that he had moved his position on evidence once or twice.

O'Neill, in the round, painted a picture of a Government in the 1980s where ministers like Ahern worked among those who would later become tainted with sleaze or corruption but seemed to be unaware of it. In one intriguing exchange, he put it to the Taoiseach that it was "entirely implausible" that Tom Gilmartin would not have told him about his alleged difficulties with Liam Lawlor and George Redmond, to wit, that they had demanded money of him.

A number of documents from the time were projected onto the screen.

They showed that in 1989, as O'Neill contended, Gilmartin was telling anybody who would listen about his difficulties with Lawlor and Redmond. He told senior city officials. Senior gardaí conducting an investigation into planning corruption were also aware. As was Ted Dadley, an executive of Arlington, the company that was financing the shopping centre at Bachelors Walk. As was the Department of Environment. A year and a half later in October, 1990, Gilmartin told Sean Sherwin, Fianna Fáil's national adviser.

Mr Ahern accepted that Gilmartin phoned him in and around May of 1989 but said the only difficulty that Gilmartin had mentioned was concern over a tender he had submitted to buy the lands at Quarryvale.

Mr Ahern said, though he could not recall the conversation, that was all that could have come up. At that time, he was embroiled in a general Election campaign and, if somebody had begun to tell him a "rant" or a "long saga", he would have cut him short. He said that arising from that phone call, he had got FF councillor Joe Burke to contact Gilmartin and make enquiries about the tender.

O'Neill pointed out Mr Gilmartin was telling everybody about his hassles with Lawlor and Redmond at the time. He put it to the Taoiseach that it was "entirely implausible that you were not told by Mr Gilmartin about the fact that Mr Redmond and Mr Lawlor were asking for money?"

Mr Ahern rejected that thesis out of hand. He replied that the phone call related simply to the tender. Mr Gilmartin was worried about it, was looking for reassurance. The Taoiseach, "out of the kindness of my heart" helped him, though it was in the middle of an election campaign.

In his line of questioning, Mr O'Neill came back again and again to the scandals and the allegations of corruption, painting an unflattering portrait of the political world at the time. When the Taoiseach said that an allegation like those made by Mr Gilmartin would be immediately investigated within Fianna Fail "under my watch" (i.e. since he became leader in 1994), it seemed to ring a little hollow. The import of Mr O'Neill's questions was that nothing was done about it at the higher levels of Fianna Fail at the time.

But in the course of his evidence and cross-examination, Mr Ahern accepted the following. Under questioning by tribunal lawyer John Gallagher, he accepted that there could have been an informal chit chat. Later, under cross-examination by Mr O'Neill he fully accepted he had had three meetings with Tom Gilmartin and two phone conversations.

However, he would not accept that his first meeting with the developer was in 1987 and not on October 10, 1988, when he met him in his constituency clinic in Drumcondra. Mr Ahern seemed strong on this point, as he said that it was not every day that a man walks into your clinic proposing a £200-300 million development in his constituency.

He strongly rejected the contention of Mr O'Neill that his position had changed since his dealings with Mr Gilmartin were first published in newspapers in January 1999.

Mr Ahern was also steadfast that he had not attended a meeting with Dublin city managers in September 1987, as suggested in a statement to the tribunal by George Redmond.

But he did accept that he attended a second meeting with the city officials in February 1988, at which he seemed to be the minister with most knowledge on Bachelors' Walk and was to the fore in discussing the project. Mr Ahern said that would not have been unusual given that it was in his constituency.

However, the date of the meeting was intriguing. It took place on February 2, the day after the meeting or 'chit-chat' with ministers that Mr Gilmartin claims to have occurred.