Party’s view of Ahern funds just doesn’t add up

A CONSTANT in the Fianna Fáil defence of the money flying into Bertie Ahern’s bank accounts in the 1990s is that the sums involved were not very substantial.

Mr Ahern’s brother, Noel Ahern, trotted out this defence again in recent days following the potentially devastating evidence of Gráinne Carruth at the Mahon Tribunal last week.

Ms Carruth accepted she had exchanged sums totalling stg£15,500 to punts and lodged the monies on Bertie Ahern’s behalf while working as a secretary for him in 1994.

This was in direct contradiction of Mr Ahern’s own evidence, in which he said the lodgments involved were the proceeds of his salary cheques.

Noel Ahern’s response to Ms Carruth’s evidence was that stg£15,500 wasn’t a lot of money.

“It’s not enormous money,” he said. “I don’t think it’s enormous.”

Yet stg£15,500 comfortably exceeded the average industrial wage that year.

In 1994, according to Government figures, the average industrial wage stood at IR£13,418.

In just a handful of lodgments, then, the Taoiseach had accrued more than the average person was earning in a year.

The public is being asked to believe, as Fine Gael TD Phil Hogan put it yesterday, that this amounted to “small beer”.

It’s not just Noel Ahern however, who has been making the small beer argument. It has been a constant refrain from Fianna Fáil any time the question of payments to the Taoiseach has arisen.

Yet, as the figures on this page today show, the sums flying around the Taoiseach’s bank accounts over the space of just two years in the 1990s were, indeed, substantial.

These figures represent the various lodgements and transactions that the tribunal has confirmed did take place on accounts linked to Mr Ahern between late 1993 and 1995.

Some of the money went into accounts in his name, other sums went into accounts in his daughters’ name, and there were also lodgments to accounts in the name of Celia Larkin, his then partner.

They are not an exhaustive list, merely the ones the tribunal has chosen to focus on to date.

Add the transactions up, and they come to more than IR£250,000 over the two-year period in question. It is difficult to see just how Fianna Fáil can continue to claim this money was insignificant.

But of course, this is just one of the weak elements in the Taoiseach’s explanation of his personal finances. The more immediate, and more pressing, problem, is how to explain the sterling.

To date, some of the answers Mr Ahern has given for the monies he received have sounded only barely plausible. Crucially, however, his explanations weren’t fatally undermined. Last week, for the first time, that may have happened. Mr Ahern said the lodgments to his account in the Irish Permanent branch in Drumcondra in 1994 hadn’t derived from sterling; Ms Carruth accepted that they had.

Furthermore, the tribunal heard from Blair Hughes, manager of the branch at the time, who indicated that the lodgments had, in fact, stemmed from exchanges of sterling.

Now, Mr Ahern finds himself in a dilemma. He can continue to deny that the money was sterling — a position the tribunal is distinctly unlikely to believe.

Or he can admit that it was sterling, in which case he’ll have to explain how this money came into his possession.

Such an admission would, of itself, raise two more problems:

* Can he find a plausible explanation for why he had so much sterling on his hands?

* If he does admit it was sterling, he would leave himself wide open to the accusation that he lied to the tribunal.

Either way, trouble looms for the Taoiseach. The Dáil resumes on Wednesday following the Easter recess. As part of the routine daily schedule, Mr Ahern will have to take questions from opposition leaders.

Almost certainly, the questions will be about his personal finances. His answers will be awaited with interest.