Mahon leak - Public have right to ask questions

NOT quite all of his Cabinet colleagues might agree with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern when yesterday he described a “calculated leak” as “sinister”.

His Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, who was recently elevated to the position of Tánaiste, used precisely such a device not too long ago. He admitted leaking to the Irish Independent documents relating to a story alleging that somebody had applied for a bogus passport to travel to Colombia.

Mr Ahern is now surrounded by a political furore because somebody leaked information from the Mahon Tribunal relating to himself to the Irish Times.

Basically, that newspaper reported that he received between €50,000 and €100,000 from businessmen while going through a legal separation from his wife more than a decade ago.

He was minister for finance at the time, and therefore a member of the government.

While he has confirmed receiving payments from a number of people, he has dismissed as “off the wall” the figures quoted by the newspaper, maintaining that they were just a fraction of that.

Maybe they were, but that is not the point.

He accepted gifts at a time when he was a senior member of the government, and the issue is now in the public domain, no matter how much Mr Ahern might wish otherwise.

The fact that he has supplied the Mahon Tribunal with full information about his financial affairs is important, but irrelevant in the current context. It is incumbent upon him to explain the donations because by his own publicly imposed standard that “public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone”.

The Mahon Tribunal may have taken legal steps against the Irish Times to prevent further publication of confidential information relating to him, but Mr Ahern has to confront this particular issue.

It simply will not evaporate, because it is too important and touches upon the most important political office in the country.

The matter is unsettling, because rumour and innuendo surround that office-holder and it is completely unacceptable to suggest that it is nobody’s business but his own and that of the Mahon Tribunal.

It is very much the concern of the public, and they are properly entitled to know the facts which currently cloak the circumstances as to why a senior government minister, now occupying the powerful position of Taoiseach, accepted private donations.

It is within his own gift to quell those rumours and innuendo, and the sooner he does the better it will be for the country.