Figures not my forte, pleads trustee

IT WASN’T the most auspicious fresh start for a future taoiseach.

The house bought to be his new base was sinking into the Liffey and its trustees were obsessed with thoughts of their boss’s demise courtesy of a fast-moving vehicle.

His local organisation’s valiant efforts at fundraising via golf classics were written out of party history and to top it all, one of his main money men had no head for figures.

“Mr Chairman, figures are not my forte,” pleaded Tim Collins, a St Luke’s trustee and holder of the infamous “BT” or “Building Trust” account through which all manner of unusual and inexplicable monies flowed faster than the river that was threatening to submerge the Drumcondra HQ.

He didn’t seem to see the joke when he informed Judge Mahon straight-faced that the account was “a sinking fund”, subsequently used as security for a loan for works to stop St Luke’s doing a St Brendan and taking a voyage into the open water.

“In the event of anything happening to Bertie Ahern — getting knocked down or anything — the trustees would not be responsible for any debt on St Luke’s,” he explained of the original reason for the account’s existence.

In the 19 years since the account was opened, Bertie has avoided collisions of the vehicular kind although his head-on encounters with the tribunal have been painful.

This was a trip down no-memory lane for Mr Collins whose repeated appeal to the tribunal was: “I don’t know, I can’t recollect, I have no explanation.”

Tribunal counsel Des O’Neill was happy to fill in the gaps. This was the account from which a £30,000 “loan” was provided to Celia Larkin to buy a house for her elderly aunts.

It paid out £20,000 for repair works to St Luke’s that were never carried out and a subsequent lodgment meant to be the return of that money just happened to be in sterling — one of the dreaded foreign currencies that Bertie keeps struggling to explain.

And despite the busy nature of the account, there was little documentation to support the contention that anything was what it claimed to be or came from where it was supposed to have been sourced. There was just one thing Mr Collins was sure of — BT did not mean “Bertie and Tim”. Maybe not, but unless there are some good explanations on the way, it could well come to mean “bruised and tattered” for the Taoiseach.