Planning Tribunal - Burke only has himself to blame

The decision by Judge Alan Mahon to deny former Government minister Ray Burke’s application that the State should bear his more than €10 million legal costs arising from the Planning Tribunal will be a major relief to the State.

It would have been perceived as a travesty had it been otherwise, because Mr Burke is the architect of his own financial dilemma.

He was adjudged to have consistently given misleading and false evidence to the tribunal which was investigating planning corruption in Dublin.

His economy with the truth was a false one, as he and his legal team have discovered, and the latter are left with cause to ponder Judge Mahon's indifference to their client's inability to pay the costs he incurred.

Because the former Fianna Fáil TD and minister had prolonged the tribunal by deliberately giving untruthful evidence designed to obstruct the inquiry and prevent it arriving at the truth, Judge Mahon said that it did not matter that Mr Burke was not a wealthy man who could not afford to pay.

Under different circumstances, Ray Burke would have been considered a man of a financially comfortable disposition, if only on the basis of his salaries and pensions accruing from being a former TD and minister.

By any standards, he would certainly have been better financially positioned than the vast majority of the taxpayers whom he and his lawyers expected should have had to pick up his legal bill.

Doubtlessly, it was this expectation that the State would be lumbered with such a massive legal bill that led him into the folly where he would contemptuously flout the longest-running and most expensive tribunal set up in this country.

It was, after all, established to inquire into payments he received in the '80s and '90s.

Mr Burke failed to give the tribunal a truthful account of these, an attitude he maintained when questioned about the existence of offshore accounts and how he acquired his home at Briarsgate in Swords.

Last July, when his lawyers formally applied to the tribunal that his costs should be borne by the Minister for Finance the taxpayer they averred that no citizen could bear seven years of legal costs.

Very few citizens would put themselves in the position of facing such a vista.

Ray Burke, by his own calculated actions, which did not entertain the prospect of having to eventually answer for them, chose to do so.

He has reaped what he has sown and the general public will, no doubt, share Judge Mahon's indifference about his inability to pay breathtakingly high legal costs.

Objectively, the public's endorsement of the judiciousness of his decision could be gauged on a measure comparable to the extent the legal costs had reached.

While Judge Mahon has ruled out any liability on the part of the public purse for those costs, Mr Burke, along with five other parties, has indicated a High Court challenge to the tribunal's original findings.

Interestingly, neither Mr Burke nor his lawyers attended court to hear the decision which contained no comfort for them.

For the latter, it was compounded by the fact the judge added they may have been used unwittingly as a conduit for false or misleading information.