Nobody the wiser after 63-minute Lowry marathon

AFTER 63 minutes and 10,913 self-pitying words, the air of corruption hanging over Michael Lowry had not lifted one inch.

Despite demanding, and being granted, speaking time greater than that of the Taoiseach and the leader of the opposition combined, Lowry took us nowhere.

Well, nowhere except down to a tortured, self-obsessed dead-end of denial, during an overwrought and over-long contribution to the Dáil debate into the tribunal findings which damned him.

However, the Moriarty probe had not just thrown him into the dock of public opinion, but the whole vista of Irish political greed as well.

Enda Kenny used the occasion to launch his most vitriolic attack yet on the legacy of Bertie Ahern, contemptuously dismissing him as: “a taoiseach degrading our nation and this office by trousering after-dinner tips”.

But is it worse to be pocketing tips, or to be — as Lowry’s then Rainbow Cabinet colleagues like Mr Kenny were — dumb waiters, manipulated and misled by a middle-ranking minister who, Moriarty ruled, was helping Denis O’Brien secure the most lucrative contract in the history of the state?

For all his talk of bringing a “new morality” to bear on Irish politics, Mr Kenny had little to say on that, and absolutely nothing to explain why it had taken Fine Gael three years and a media exposé to return the $50,000 it pocketed from the winners of the mobile phone licence just two months after the contract was awarded.

Lowry, who Moriarty found to have been engaged in a “profoundly corrupt” act with businessman Ben Dunne over an attempt to set rents, saw nothing but a vast judicial conspiracy designed to entrap him.

He had been the victim of a “show trial by a team of liars” which had inflicted “Chinese torture” on him, dispensed from a “throne of infallibility”, giving “rough justice its finest hour” on evidence that wouldn’t “stand up in a pub, never mind a court of law”, as our butterfly Lowry was broken on the wheel of “brazen vindictiveness”.

Phew! No wonder he had to mop his sweaty brow at the end of it all, especially after that lightening strike of anger which saw his voice break and his body tense as he demanded “the army” search his property to find evidence of the £900,000 in monies Moriarty said had been channelled to him as “payments” from Mr O’Brien.

Well, the routes of those transactions were so complex it would probably take special forces trackers to pin down the trail.

And it remains startling to see Fianna Fáil, still sorely in need of decontamination in the public mind, race for the high ground of political probity, but Micheál Martin was right when he insisted the Moriarty findings were not based on the prejudices of a judge, but “on the evidence” — it will be interesting to see if he sticks to that line if the Mahon corruption probe comes down hard on Bertie.

Mr O’Brien’s name appeared repeatedly in the saga, as when Sinn Féin’s Jonathan O’Brien started to lay into the way Esat was awarded the licence and his microphone was momentarily cut-out by interference from a cell-phone, as he quipped: “Ironic isn’t it? Denis O’Brien has some power!”

Socialist TD Joe Higgins was also fascinated by Mr O’Brien’s generous bounty in the mid-’90s, quoting a letter from Fine Gael’s Phil Hogan sent to the Esat boss seven weeks before the awarding of the contract which thanked the tycoon for his contribution to a party golf tournament fundraiser, stressing: “Your very generous sponsorship of £4,000 will be used two-fold, with £1,000 sponsoring a hole and the remaining balance sponsoring the wine for the gala dinner.”

Ever handy with a whiplash turn of phrase, Mr Higgins added: “Two months before Fine Gael in government awarded the most valuable contract in the history of this state, the private individual who was desperately looking for it was lubricating the throats of Fine Gael grandees at a gala dinner.

“Is it not obvious to everybody this was to lubricate the licence process?”

Even Richard Bruton could not help sniggering at the imagery.

But while Fine Gael may have been so grateful to have received £1,000 for the sponsorship of that hole, they are still trying to clamber out of the hole in their credibility left by that curious $50,000 they received from Esat partners Teledor which went to them along a route that would make a crazy golf course seem uneventful and pedestrian.

Mr Kenny insisted he had “no hand, act or part” in the New York fundraiser where the $50,000 first appeared — an unfortunate phrase given his earlier words, as that was always a favourite line of Bertie’s.

But Enda is no Bertie, just as Lowry is no victim.

However, Mr Kenny is eventually going to have to come clean on his party’s stained acceptance — and then concealment of — that $50,000 if he is really ever to fulfil his ambition to lead this country out of the shameful shadow of whip-arounds, walk-about money and trousered tips.