‘Cokehead minister’ another story that seems too good to be true

THERE are times when stories crop up in print that seem just too good to be true.

There was the scurrilous story surrounding Liam Lawlor’s death in Moscow. And the unfounded allegations carried by Magill in 2002 that Mary Harney had accepted cash from a businessman. And of course Corkman Denis ‘Starry’ O’Brien’s claims that he gave Bertie Ahern £30,000 in the car park of the Burlington Hotel in 1991.

All of those stories had one common feature: they weren’t true.