This mud is set to stick

TWICE before, allegations have been made about the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and donations from wealthy businessman. And twice before they came to nothing.

While one-time luminaries from Fianna Fáil fell like skittles around him at the hands of tribunals, Mr Ahern lived up to his Teflon Taoiseach reputation. The allegations made by Cork businessman Dennis “Starry” O’Brien that he had handed over IR£50,000 to Mr Ahern in the early 1990s were proved to be bogus and groundless.

And while the Taoiseach took some stick about whether or not he had a “chit chat” meeting with Tom Gilmartin, the claims from the Luton-based builder ultimately came to nothing. Like the cheques he once signed for Charles J Haughey, all that was drawn were blanks.

But the fresh revelations concerning Mr Ahern and payments seem to have more stickability to them and his spirited defence yesterday raised far more questions than he answered.

The core of the new information is a claim that businessman David McKenna made payments of between €50,000 to €100,000 to Mr Ahern in 1993 when he was Minister for Finance. These were used, said the report in yesterday’s Irish Times, to deflect legal costs.

There seemed to be a degree ofdissembling and diversion in the Taoiseach’s response during his visit in Clare. It was clear he was livid that confidential information he had given to the Planning Tribunal had been leaked. He peppered his response with words like ‘dirty’, ‘scurrilous’ and ‘unjust’ and said the motivation behind the leak was to damage him politically.

He also pointed out that he himself had volunteered this information after false allegations had been made that he received money from Eoin O’Callaghan. He said one of the tribunal’s lines of inquiry in the Quarryvale module was whether or not a donation was made to him. “I’ll give you the information. The figure on O’Callaghan is zero,” he said yesterday.

But the revelations yesterday have nothing to do with the Quarryvale saga, even if Mr Ahern disclosed the information of his own accord as part of the investigation into that land deal.

This new information concerns his personal life and particularly his legal separation from his former wife Miriam in 1993. The only aspect of yesterday’s report that was disputed by the Taoiseach was the quantum. “The figures are off the wall,” he said.

But, he later explicitly acknowledged that sums were received and also indicated that there may have been donors other than Mr McKenna. The Irish Examiner has established that some friends gave Mr Ahern what was described as a “dig-out” while going through the separation procedures.

The Taoiseach yesterday was adamant that this was a private matter and that he had no political or moral obligation to say anything about it. He had dealt with it all aspects of the payment, including tax issues, in a manner that was proper, he argued.

“What I got personally in my life, to be frank with you, is none of your business,” he told reporters. “If I got something from somebody as a present or something like that I can use it. If I got money from a family member or something but I’ve given that detail to show I got nothing wrongly and I dealt with it properly in my books and I did absolutely fairly.”

A little later, he insisted — very strongly, very forcefully — that he had absolutely no questions to answer.

But politically, that defence is a kite Mr Ahern will have difficulty floating. There may be nothing illegal. There may be no investigation. But the culture of politics has been transformed in the past decade in the aftermath of the McCracken Tribunal revelations.

The political ethics legislation that was introduced after McCracken obliged politicians to disclose any donation they received that was greater than IR£500. Although he wouldn’t say how much he received, it is certain that Mr Ahern would have had to disclose the donations if the legislation was in place at the time.

There is also the “optics” of a senior politician and a Minister for Finance (which Mr Ahern was in 1993) accepting donations or gifts from private individuals, irrespective of how worthy or well-meaning the motive.

The Taoiseach, his political opponents pointed out yesterday, missed the point when trying to draw a distinction between allegations of corrupt payments and donations relating to a deeply personal matter.

“I’m not answering what I got for my Holy Communion money, my confirmation money, what I got for my birthday and what I got for anything else,” he said.

Fair enough. But he received these other payments when he was a senior member of the Government. And even though you can even compare the payments with the biblical sums received by Charles Haughey, is the principle not the same? Haughey’s family argued that friends banded together to help the late Taoiseach out by way of private donations.

Opposition parties yesterday pointed out that the Taoiseach’s defence seemed to go against the grain of statements he himself has made following the McCracken report.

In the Dáil on September 10, 1997, he said: “The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone.”

He told his Árd Fheis earlier this year to said that Fianna Fáil could not condone the practice of senior politicians seeking or receiving, from a single donor, large sums of money or services in kind, be they Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil, or the former Workers Party, now mostly Democratic Left.

Mr Justice McCracken’s report said that it was unacceptable that a member of Dáil Eireann should be supported in his personal life by gifts.

There is an understandable ire on Mr Ahern’s part. He volunteered the information readily to the tribunal. He showed that it was dealt with in an appropriate manner, as far as the legalities and tax issues were concerned. And then somebody leaked it.

For all that, the political culture has moved on and there is a moral imperative on politicians to disclose the source of donations or funds they receive, as well as the quantum. Particularly when the politician involved was the Minister for Finance at the time, there is a need to give public assurance that there were no favours sought or received and to show that it did not impact on his ministerial role.

Notwithstanding the nature of the disclosure — dirty leak as it may have been — the Taoiseach will now face enormous pressure to disclose the identities of the businessmen who gave him the money, the circumstances in which it was paid and the amount of money that was involved.

If it was as he says, a fraction of the sums mentioned in the newspaper report, he should have no difficulty in disclosing the amount involved.