Fianna Fáil faces a period of more questions than answers
Browne was on old ground. Over the years, he irritated the Fianna Fáil faithful and many of his colleagues by tackling a similar issue with Charlie Haughey. Browne just would not quit. Haughey refused to talk about his finances and people got tired of what was seen as Browne’s act.
But time proved that Browne was right to persist with such questions. We still don’t have most of the answers, but at least Browne had the courage and foresight to persevere, unlike most of his colleagues.
Thus, on Thursday, when Browne got the microphone, there were some, such as PJ Mara, who would probably have liked to have taken it off him, but this would have been like trying to wrestle a bone from a rottweiler. Down through the years Browne has earned the right to that microphone — and he told Mara as much at one point.
“Twenty years ago, at Fianna Fáil press conferences, we attempted to press the then leader of Fianna Fáil on his financial affairs and we were obstructed in doing so, and were obstructed in doing so again in 1989,” Browne said. “I hope that Fianna Fáil has changed and that we won’t be obstructed in doing so now.”
The Taoiseach has done himself no favours by refusing to address the issue since calling the election and some feel the whole thing has begun to look suspiciously like the election was timed to avoid answering questions at the tribunal.
At the press conference, the questions were not going to go away, no matter how much the Fianna Fáil gathering might have wished it. From the sustained applause the Taoiseach’s answers received, it was obvious party supporters were uneasy and wanted the interrogation to end.
In fairness, Bertie kept his cool and, to an extent, ran rings around Browne in responding to but not actually answering his questions.
Why did Michael Wall give Bertie £30,000 for the renovation of a house he had not even yet purchased nor even put a down payment on? Of course, it was Wall’s money to do with as he wished. But people should ask why he wished to do it, just as they asked why Ben Dunne wished to give some of his millions to Haughey.
After Browne ended his interrogation, there was one further — even more pertinent — question. A journalist noted that the Taoiseach had refused to answer a question about £5,000 he received from NCB chief executive Padraic O’Connor, as part of the infamous “dig-out”.
Although described as a friend of the Taoiseach, O’Connor reportedly stated that they were never friends. He said he gave the money because he was asked to contribute to the funding of Bertie’s constituency offices. Even more ominously, O’Connor said he received an invoice for the money, supposedly having been paid to a consultancy firm for health and safety advice.
“Would you now answer that question, please?” the journalist asked.
“No, I wouldn’t,” the Taoiseach replied.
Questions about the money overshadowed the press conference called to launch the Fianna Fáil election manifesto. It revived memories of the 1973 general election campaign that marked the end of 16 years of Fianna Fáil rule.
BRIAN COWEN, meanwhile, ruled out changes to stamp duty, denouncing the opposition’s stamp duty proposal as auction politics. “As Minister for Finance, I am making it very clear to you there is no way the Fianna Fáil party, as a responsible party, is going to get engaged in this auction,” he insisted. “I am not going to do it.”
Ruling out stamp duty for just first-time buyers was a modest enough proposal, but it was obviously designed to counteract the promises of their opponents. Pretending otherwise is unlikely to fool any one.
The whole issue is reminiscent of the way Fianna Fáil ruled out removing the rates on dwelling houses in 1973. Martin O’Donoghue, then Taoiseach Jack Lynch’s main economic adviser, advocated that Fianna Fáil should promise to abolish rates on homes, but the then Finance Minister George Colley rejected the idea. In a joint manifesto, Fine Gael and Labour had captured the public imagination by promising to abolish VAT on food.
Fianna Fáil had been upstaged. Lynch then made the sensational promise to remove rates on all homes from April 1, 1974. Only seven weeks earlier, a Government white paper had come out against the abolition of rates. Right up to early in the week of the change, Colley had reaffirmed that there was no alternative to the rates, even though he said they were unfair.
“The coalition has taunted us about not putting forward our programme, and this is our answer to them,” Lynch said in defending the U-turn. But his promise to abolish the rates brought the credibility of the party’s whole campaign into question.
Ridiculing the coalition proposals, Brian Lenihan said, “There is no point in transferring taxation from one pocket to another.” But Lynch seemed to be proposing to do just that in order to raise the £35 million which would be lost as a result of removing rates.
“I would not deny that we would have to raise extra taxation,” Lynch said. “Somebody is going to have to pay.” But he refused to say who would pay. “It is not the practice of a government to say where it will come from.”
After labelling the coalition proposals with all kinds of tags from “pie-in-the- sky” to “pious platitudes”, Fianna Fáil had succumbed to the temptation of trying to upstage the coalition offer. Lynch denied his new proposals were “a bribe”.
“To any objective observer they clearly are,” wrote Liam O’Neill of the Cork Examiner. “It does seem that Fianna Fáil, by the production of their proposals yesterday, have flown in the face of almost everything they had been saying about policies since the election campaign began … Certainly, the issue now is one of credibility.”
There was real embarrassment for Fianna Fáil the next day when the Limerick Leader published a large advertisement in the form a message to the voters in Limerick West from the Fianna Fáil candidates — Gerry Collins, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, and Michael Noonan.
“Jack Lynch has not tried to ensure re-election by trading on the innocence of some of the people. He does not dangle rosy promises of no VAT on food, no rates, etc, to win over the unsuspecting,” the advert asserted. Fianna Fáil only fooled its own with that stunt in 1973. That was the government that got us into the mire of the Northern Troubles.
Bertie Ahern and his colleagues deserve particular credit for handling the peace process and certain aspects of the economy but there are questions about the voting machines debacle, the extravagant inefficiency of the health service, the audacious behaviour of criminals and the persistent political corruption.
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