Nobody actually openly accused Bertie Ahern of lying yesterday. But if you were to look up a thesaurus, you’d find that just about every possible alternative word for ‘lie’ was used by Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore when describing the Taoiseach’s evidence to the Mahon Tribunal.

There is a basic rule in the Dáil. The ‘L’ word may never be uttered. In the past, we have seen some creative words and phrases being employed: dissembling; misleading the Dail; untruth; ‘being economical with the truth’.

But yesterday was of a different order. The L word was never uttered. But during the motion of confidence – and let’s make no mistake about – it was clearly meant. There was to be no softening of the blows. To all intents and purposes – but without every actually saying so – Kenny and Gilmore accused the Taoiseach of lying and lying and lying again.

During a heated, angry and self-evidently bitter debate on the motion of confidence in the Taoiseach – the first motion brought since one against Albert Reynolds in November 1994 – Ahern found himself being accused of giving incredible accounts, of fabricating, of not being credible, of creating smoke screens, of gelling bizarre and shifting tales. And all of this was said under oath, during his 18 hours of evidence to the Tribunal.

The charges that Kenny and Gilmore laid were far more serious, far graver than most of us had anticipated. Not alone did they accuse him of the L word. They claimed that most of the events that he has based his entire defence on never took place. They contended that events recalled by Ahern in interviews and under oath to the Tribunal – the famous Manchester dinner, the dig-out from friends, the Michael Wall payment, the purchase of £30,000 sterling – never took place.

This was the core of Kenny’s argument in one of the best speeches he has made since he becoming leder: “Most of the events we were discussing never happened. In my view, in my opinion, they’re fictitious. Complicated stories, part of a web of complicated stories designed to mask hard facts. Constructed stories to fit known facts.”
Phew! That was strong stuff and potentially as corrosive as sulphuric acid. And though he didn’t say it either, what Kenny also suggested that Ahern was on the take when he lodged amounts between 1993 and 1995 that equated to €300,000 in today’s terms.

“We have heard no credible explanation from the Taoiseach for these lodgements. In the absence of such an explanation the deep suspicion must remain that these lodgements were a result of personal contributions made to the Taoiseach.”
And in a speech designed to – and which probably did – get under Ahern’s craw, Kenny quoted lines from Des O’Malley (“I stand by the Republic”) and Jack Lynch (“we cannot stand idly by”) to make unfavourable comparisons to Ahern. He also quoted from Charlie Haughey to make even more unfavourable comparisons.

Gilmore, making his maiden speech as the new Labour leader, went over the same ground. He recalled the Taoiseach recalling next to nothing about the dinner in Manchester and then pointed out that Ahern claimed on the Late Late Show in 1998 that one of his best attributes was a good memory.”

His recurring theme – in a speech that was serious and under-stated - was that he did not believe Ahern, that the Taoiseach was making up cock and bull stories.

“I don’t believe him. Most of his own deputies don’t believe him and the public clearly doesn’t’ believe him either,” was a phrase that was uttered more than once.
And this is Taoiseach’s big quandary. There’s a serious credibility problem there that can’t be explained by unusual circumstances or his marriage break-down or by what he described as his ‘unorthodox affairs’ during his marital separation in the 1990s.

Yesterday he again urged people to read the 18 hours of transcript. But anyone who reads it will be no clearer about all those information and credibility gaps. If anything they will be bewildered and more confused.

He – and all his Ministers who spoke – also argued that there was not a scintilla of proof to back up the central allegation made by Tom Gilmartin that he took payments from Owen O’Callaghan.

Joe Higgins was spot-on last week when describing the use of this particular blatant diversionary tactic. Higgins gloriously employed a famous Bertie-ism to describe Bertie dragging Owen O'Callaghan and Tom Gilmartin in:

“It’s throwing red herrings at white elephants.”

But it’s not about Tom Gilmartin any more. It’s about all these odd transactions, all these unremembered and half-remembered sterling and Irish sums passing through accounts controlled by him. And why his explanation of them is of the ‘the dog has eaten my homework’ type.

He was effective in pointing out the belated courage of both Fine Gael and Labour in going for his political jugular. “One day they blow hot and the next day they blow cold. Last May to them due process was an excuse not to comment but today, political accountability is the pretext for their questioning.”

He repeated his defence against allegations made in the Tribunal, rebutting allegations that he had delayed or not cooperated or dissembled. But it’s all a bit conditional. He said he waived confidentiality on bank documents and consented to the Tribunal obtaining discovery against AIB. But he forgot to mention yesterday that he only did so when forced to by the opposition.

And as for changing his evidence he asserted: “The fundamental of my evidence have remained the same. I have added some detail and elaborated in some areas for reasons which I shall explain…. It is a matter of reality that one’s recollection can be helped as new information comes to light.”

And in a day where little love was lost, where both sides strongly signalled that the 30th Dail will be a tenser, colder House, he accused his political foes of “stretching the available evidence with malign invention.”

The thrust of the Government defence, put most passionately by Tánaiste Brian Cowen in the closing speech (and boy does he sound like leader-designate) the opposition were hypocrites in that they had only discovered high standards and morality after the election, where before polling day they back-pedalled from BertieGate more quickly than a professional cyclist on dope.

“I know right from wrong. And the Tribunal will be the arbitrer. If we are to avoid arbitrary justice let the Tribunal proceed with its deliberations.”
Ahern sat through it all, uncomfortably. It’s clear he finds it all, as he said in his speech, unseemly and intrusive. For him once no evidence is adduced of payments from Owen O’Callaghan, the rest is nobody’s business. The payments were, as he put it, being “assisted by friends”. In his moral compass, he did nothing wrong. He made a big deal of paying back €100,000 but he only did that when he had to (in 2006), when the outing of the payments last year forced him to do that.

And if he was uncomfortable, the Greens seemed to be squirming in their seats. Trevor Sargent, Eamon Ryan, Ciaran Cuffe and Mareey White didn’t clap at the end of Ahern’s speech as the loyal FFers did, but we were later told that nothing turned on that. The opposition reminded the party of how quickly it had rolled down from the high moral ground into the swamp. Trevor Sargents excoriations of FF in the run-up to the election campaign were recalled. And when John Gormley finally made an appearance in the chamber shortly after 8pm, he said little more than he would wait until the Tribunal reported. He then resorted to the magician’s trick of misdirection by reciting Green policy objectives in Government. There are times to talk about climate change but last nights was not one of them.

The L word was never used. They didn’t have to. This was the most serious attack Ahern faced in 30 years of politics. Strategically, the Government banked completely on the Tribunal report. When it does report (will it be next year or 2009?) if it criticises him to any serious extent, he will be a goner. One senior Green Party person thought privately that it might be as soon as the Christmas break.

We have all gone through the disconnect between the media and Joe Schmo out there. But no matter how you look at this one, Bertie Ahern has been damaged.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE 3

There’s a short story by Ernest Hemingway called Fifty Grand. It’s about a boxer on the decline who bets against himself and then takes a tumble in the ring. At the end of, the hero checks out of the story with a killer line: "It's funny how fast you can think when it means that much money”.
If you’ve ever read Hemingway, you will know that his writing was so disciplined that his fiction appears as fact. He applied a strict rule that if it didn’t read like real life, it just didn’t go on,
With Bertie Ahern his ‘fact’ often appears as fiction, not so much real life as unreal life. Take his own not-so-very-short short story also called Fifty Grand. This is the £50,000 that Ahern lodged into Celia Larkin’s account in December 1994. And boy what a saga surrounds it. Did he withdraw it the following month simply because he preferred to deal with cash? Or wanted Celia Larkin and Micheal Wall to get on with it? Or because he was thinking of not buying the famous Beresford Avenue house after all?
And what did he do with it? Did he save it? Did he spend it? Not at all. This is Bertie Ahern we are taking about. Around the house and mind the dresser! The fifty grand went on a merry wander being lodged, withdrawn, stashed into a safe, withdrawn, partly converted to sterling, lodged in dribs and drabs to two different accounts over 12 months. In fact, it was recycled with a totality usually only found in Green Party manifestos.
In the afternoon of the third day of the Taoiseach’s appearance at the Planning Tribunal, the cross-examination finally got to the heart of the matter. To say that the tortuously slow pace of Tribunal lawyer Des O’Neill has been snail-like would be to do an injustice to small shelled insects everywhere. As an audience experience, it has sometimes felt a little like Open University quantum mechanics… in slow motion.
But exhaustively slow as it has been, it has been cleverly designed. Yesterday morning, O’Neill put up a chart showing the five big foreign exchange transactions that Ahern made between October 1994 and December 1995. He got the Taoiseach to agree that they were all memorable, collectively and individually. And that set the tenor for the entire day.
And I will paraphrase seven hours of questioning into one line: if they were all so memorable why the hell does the Taoiseach remember so little about them or has had to refresh his memory with new details so often?
All day, O’Neill returned again and again to Ahern’s dealings with the Tribunal over two and a half years, He probed him on why he omitted so much material information until so late in the process. He also questioned him on why his accounts have changed, sometimes with each telling.
In the morning, the thrust of his questioning seemed to centre once again on the issue of Ahern’s compliance. At one stage, O’Neill accused Ahern of being in “clear breach” of his obligations to comply with an order of discovery. But this was revisiting much of Thursday and Friday’s evidence and you wondered what was the point of it? Eas the Tribunal team going to content itself with making a case that Ahern had not fully cooperated with the Tribunal?
But then in the afternoon, the tack changed. Again O’Neill cleaved to the chronology, again asked Ahern why he had been shy with information, why he had introduced changes into the narrative. But now it wasn’t about compliance. It was about testing the credibility of Ahern’s story. And gradually (everything is gradual in Dublin Castle) O’Neill began zeroing in on the amazing story of Bertie’s fifty grand.
Just before we get into the nitty-gritty details, it must be said that Ahern had a stronger day. He conceded nothing and quibbled over, challenged, contextualised, every area of consensus that O’Neill tried to establish. And he refused at all times to give a straight yes or no, and took potshots at O’Neill’s questions at every opportunity.
“What you want to do is to speak endlessly and get me to say yes or no,” he said to him at one stage.
At another juncture he objected to O’Neill’s use of the word ‘behaviour’ when describing the withdrawal of the fifty grand from the bank.
“I hope you don’t suggest there’s anything wrong with me taking out money out of the bank account… I hope Mr Gilmartin gets the same grilling as I am,” he said with pencil thin lips.
That said, the story about the fifty grand gets longer and more convoluted each time Ahern tells it. And each times he tells it, it sounds less convincing, creates more of a credibility gap.
Bear with me, this is the boring detail bit and will take a little work. The fifty grand was money that Ahern had in two accounts and that he transferred to a new account Celia Larkin opened in December 1994. This was money, he said, that she was going to use to decorate Ahern’s future house in Beresford Avenue.
Ahern didn’t tell the Tribunal about the fifty grand in the Order of Discovery, but did mention it in the covering letter. The first time the fifty grand was mentioned specifically was in a report accountant Des Peelo compiled on Ahern’s financial affairs in April 2006.
Then and up until February of this year, the story about the fifty grand was simple. It was lodged in Celia’s account. It was taken out as cash a month later in January 1995. He kept it in his safe. In all 30 grand of it was spent on the house, with the balance of £19,142 being relodged into his account the following Christmas.
But then after April this year, the story became more complex. At a private interview with the Tribunal it was established that two lodgements – in June 1995 and the Christmas lodgement – involved £10,000 and £20,000 sterling respectively. Ahern agreed and now faced a bit of a quandary.
His problem was this. It was the very first time that some £30,000 in sterling was mentioned. He had sent a letter explaining the fifty grand to the Tribunal in February and never mentioned sterling. And then in April, he told the Tribunal that he now recalled that he exchanged Irish money into £30,000 sterling sometime between January and June of 1995.
The major difficulties Ahern has faced about this is that since April his explanation of why he changed the money and how he changed the money was shifted considerably.
Some of the closest questioning on this yesterday came from Judge Mary Flaherty and Judge Gerard Keys. First the why. Before April, he said he took the £50,000 out because he preferred cash. In April, he said he changed 30 grand of the 50 grand into sterling to allow Micheal Wall and Celia to refurbish the house.
And then last week, in his opening statement, he introduced a new line to the Tribunal– that he had thought about backing out of the deal with Wall to rent and then buy, and had got £30,000 sterling to give back to him. He then changed his mind.
“The explanation is an entirely different explanation. They are like polar opposites. You are intimating that you are walking away from the project,” said Judge Flaherty.
Ahern was able to show that he had given the latest explanation as long ago as May 13 during the election campaign. But the shifting sands of it did stretch credulity. What he has to show is that he is not changing his story to fit in with newly-emerged facts. And so far he’s not doing a good job of it.
Nor was he on safe ground when it came to explaining how he changed it? Thirty grand in sterling was a huge sum in 1995. There are no records in AIB of the sum being exchanged. Ahern remembers the 30 grand or thereabouts being changed into sterling but can’t remember when.
Ahern would need to notify the bank, Judge Keys reminded him. Yes, said Ahern before unfurling a whole new explanation. He might have withdrawn it by instalments, or might not have done it in a bank at all. As new leader of FF he was clocking up 120,000 on the chicken and chips circuit and might have got “somebody to do it on my behalf”.
So there you have it. Speaking of fiction, he used a classic device of murder mysteries. It was called muddying the waters.
Ultimately, I tend to agree with the former chairman Feargus Flood who said this week that he doesn’t think the Tribunal will make a finding of impropriety against him.
But that said, Ahern’s credibility and his reputation as the anorak man have taken an awful pounding. What was that line from Fifty Grand? It’s funny how fast you can think when it means that much money.

INSIDE POLITICS - FF THINK-IN AT DRUID'S GLEN

Question: What’s got a trunk, floppy ears, massive legs and grey crinkly skin?

Answer: A Fianna Fail press conference.

We had 50 minutes of it yesterday at the Fianna Fail parliamentary party meeting at Druid’s Glen including a 15 minute marathon answer from Tánaiste Brian Cowen on the economy, construction, the fundamentals, soft landings, liquidity, Northern Rock, Kerry’s victory in the All Ireland, and the spillover the sub-prime market in the US has globally.

And all the time stampeding from the corner was the elephant but the ignoring of said vast grey mammal by the top table at Fianna Fail was admirable.
When the inevitable question arose about the Mahon Tribunal, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern went into schtum mode, as he had done when being harassed by reporters during the election campaign. The question, when it arrived, was adroitly posed by TV3’s Ursula Halligan, who asked him how people had reacted to his appearance last week.

He wasn’t going to go there, he said. When she persisted, he just clammed up, pursing his lips into a rictus smile. There was a brief embarrassed silence, nothing like the extraordinary eight seconds of silence that occurred during the election campaign. But the message was clear; the subject is off limits.

The Taoiseach’s uncomfortable journey through his own marathon examination at Mahon has been the undertow of the two day annual think-in of the parliamentary party. To be sure, it was never going to be any other way, given the fact that the think-in is now sandwiched between his two appearances. But it was clear that everybody in the party was following the Boss’s lead – by saying nothing. The only thing of significance that Ahern said was that Willie O’Dea was a “great minister”. That was in response to the remarkable free run O’Dea got in the Sunday Independent to take a swipe at its Tribunal.

Ahern’s problems with his personal finances have overshadowed everything in Fianna Fail since the story first broke exactly a year ago. It panicked Ahern into calling the election early, gouged into his party’s election campaign for an agonising two weeks and is still dominating the party’s agenda in the autumn, just as the Dail returns to business proper. And if he thinks the reporters’ questions are offside, wait till the opposition parties begin to take a cut off him next week in the Dáil.

This is the extent to which it dominated. The other Fianna Fail-related story of the story was the controversial axing by Aer Lingus of its service from Shannon to Heathrow. This think-in was the first opportunity that backbench TDs from the mid-west had an opportunity to vent their frustration publicly over the issue and the Government’s cack-handed handling of it.

Yesterday, nobody brought it up at the plenary session. Nobody that is except the unexpected figure of Senator Mary White (not really associated until now with the save the stopover campaign) who took a huge cut at the leadership for abdicating its responsibility and also reportedly dressed down the Taoiseach’s special adviser Gerry Hickey for shaking his head in disagreement. We have written before about FF rebellions but it was clear that there was no appetite for mutiny yesterday. In previous years, White may have got a round of applause. But yesterday, there was silence.

In recent years, party strategists have realised that the think-in is a good way of capturing the news agenda in the slowish weeks before the Dáil returns. And so every year, there is at least one new initiative and one core message, each drip-fed in a coordinated way to the media. They took on an extra importance for the party this year, in that they would help distract the public’s attention – if only temporarily – from Mahon.

This year’s initiative was FF’s proposal to attempt to do in the North what Sinn Fein is doing in the South. It all sounds very grand except we have heard it all before, at Ard Fheiseanna over the past four or five years. And it’s all very vague. It might or might not involve a tie-up with the SDLP. It might or might not involve Fianna Fail establishing an electoral presence in the North. That only thing that’s solid is that yoke that is beloved of all political parties, a high-powered committee, has been formed to look into it. This one will be chaired by Dermot Ahern.

One other major announcement – the probability that we will have two referenda (one on Europe; the other on children) within the next 12 months. Will the age of consent be broached? Again Ahern was very circumspect, saying that it would be very hard for all parties to reach consensus on this.

The core message was simple – the economy stupid. On a day when Irish customers of Northern Rock began queuing for their money at its only Irish branch on Harcourt Street, it was important for the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste to come out with a positive line.
There was no need to panic, was the key message.

Or be to verbatim about it, this is what Ahern actually said:

“There is no place for negativity. No need for any pessimism. Above all, there is no place for politically motivated attempts to talk down the economy and the achievements of our people across all sectors.”

Ahern was particularly dismissive of one headline that said the economy was crashing.

“They are not economists who say things like that. Anyone who says that knows nothing about nothing. You wouldn’t give them a dime going down to the shop.”

He and Cowen accepted that construction had ‘moderated’ or was facing a soft landing. The figures behind those euphemisms are that new starts on houses will fall from 90,000 last year to 75,000 this year to as low as 60,000 next year. And double digit growth in departmental budgets ain’t going to happen next year. The message from Cowen was that it all must be manageable and sustainable.

This was the first PP meeting after the election and it was low-key, subdued. Especially compared to the high octane ones beginning in 2004 at Inchdoney when FF revved itself up into election footing.

This was as flat as the plains of Kildare. Not because it's the beginning of a long slog (the 2012 election), but because it's right in the middle of one (Ahern's money problems).

INSIDE POLIITICS - THIS WEEK'S COLUMN, ON BERTIE WHO ELSE!

There is a school of thought that if the report of the McCracken Tribunal into Charles Haughey’s venal trousering of other people’s money had come out a couple of months earlier, then politics would have had a different complexion over the past ten years.

The Report was published in August of 1997, over two months after the General Election of June 6. Some say that the findings of the report were so potentially catastrophic for Fianna Fail and for Bertie Ahern that if the report had been published before the election (in April or May of that year) that the three-party Rainbow coalition would comfortably have been returned to power.

I’m not so sure, not so sure at all. For one, Bertie Ahern was only a bit player in the saga surrounding payments to Charlie Haughey. Besides his little cameo (he unwittingly signing blank cheques for the party leader’s allowance) did not come to light until the Moriarty Tribunal began probing other aspects of Haughey’s personal finances.

There’s a well of forgiveness and understanding that exists in Irish society for public figures that just can’t be compared with any other democracy. My own instinct is that it’s because Ireland is a much smaller, more familiar, more intimate country than, say, Britain. And that people instinctually brand people who find themselves in sticky situations as ‘poor old divvils’ rather than ‘unmentionable so-and-sos’.

In Britain, we have seen so many ministers fall on their swords, sometimes for relatively minor transgressions. In Ireland, it needs to be in the neighbourhood of one of the seven deadly sins before it becomes career-threatening. And that's what happened to Haughey. He had long dried his well of understanding before he shuffled off this mortal coil. Posterity will recall some of his achievements but he will be primarily identified as a rogue.

The selfsame school of deep thought has made a return this week to ask the same ‘what if’ questions about Bertie Ahern. Would FF have saved the election if he had been called as a witness to the Tribunal earlier this year? Would he still be Taoiseach?

And of course, because he still is Taoiseach, there’s a second strand of reasoning. A couple of hits below the waterline might mean he will never make it to port. And this particular port of destination of course is September 2011 when Bertie Ahern reaches his 60th birthday. But of course nobody ever believed that this is feasible, that he will hand over the reins to the anointed one, Brian Cowen, eight or nine months shy of a general election.

In the best tradition of the ‘king is dead, long live the king’, there has been ongoing speculation about when Bertie Ahern will step down. Most predictions tend to hover around 2009 in or around the time of the local and European elections as a time of natural cleavage, to allow Ahern’s successor to bed himself or herself in.

The fly in the ointment is the planning tribunal and Bertie Ahern’s increasingly Byzantine explanations of those mysteriously big payments that went in and out of his account. The thinking has gone that if he fared badly at it and lost face, his tenure as leader of FF would come to an end within months.

For a long time, his Tribunal appearance looked like it would be a short sharp shock. But now it looks like it will grind on into another week, and that it will conclude just in time for the return of the Dáil and for an angry opposition to go onto the attack.

And it’s certain that he has shipped damage this week. His own protestation that he begged and pleaded and bended his knee to accommodate the Tribunal sounded a little bit hollow when Tribunal lawyer Des O’Neill made public a couple of home truths. To wit, he only made the Tribunal aware in April this year that there were foreign exchange transactions involved in three of the four lodgements being examined. He also, according to O’Neill, did not include all the relevant information (particularly the fact that Celia Larkin was operating an account on his behalf) in an affidavit of discovery. Also, yesterday morning, it became apparent that at a very early stage in the process, on New Year’s Even 2004, he himself identified all the payments totalling E85,000 which now form the basis of the inquiry into his finances but did not disclose that information to the Tribunal for a long time.

But the question remains: what will it take to down him? My own sense is that it would have to be enormous and that is not likely to happen. His famous Teflon will suffer some deep gouges this week but not enough to render him inoperable. The opposition will go after him.

But career-ending? It was wrong and unethical of him to take non-repayable repayable loans from friends, and a large sum from businessmen in Manchester. Especially since he was a high officer of State, the serving Minister for Finance. I, for one, think that taking money like that should be career-ending.

But I'm not the Irish public. And the Irish public have forgiven him, in opinion polls, elections, and – I’m sure – in opinion polls again. The Irish public has a very special relationship with its political head, that’s closer to the cult of personality found in the middle east and some South American countries. The blows to his credibility are undoubted. But ultimately they are glancing rather than fatal.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIE AHERN'S SECOND DAY AT MAHON

Those who work in the survival business – writers; sportspeople, actors and politicians - know that ultimately they are only as good as their last book, game, film or election.

Bertie Ahern is around enough to understand more than most what a precarious, dangerous and unpredictable business politics is. He will be well aware of Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failures, will have seen too many of his colleagues – Charlie Haughey, Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Padraig Flynn, and Denis Foley – see their careers and reputations upended unceremoniously for them.

What is clear is that Bertie Ahern has himself taken a bit of a hiding this week.
What is more difficult to assess is the extent of the damage to his reputation and to his standing as Taoiseach. What is sure more he walks into booby traps at the Mahon Tribunal, the shorter his period as leader will be. But it is infuriatingly difficult to make any firm conclusions. We have seen him encounter crises like this before where he looked like a sure goner only for his popularity to go shooting up in opinion polls, or for FF to win elections.

What you can say with certainty is that he will be browned off that it did not finish last night as scheduled. Fianna Fail’s annual parliamentary party think-in begins in Monday. He would have wanted the Tribunal to have been behind him by then but instead for about the fifth time in a year, his personal finances will dominate the agenda at his party.

Amongst the scribes, the consensus on yesterday went as follow: He was damaged, that he an awful day, that some of the evidence was ruinous to him, that it was death by a thousand cuts etc. But I just couldn’t bring myself to agree with it? Sure it’s serious stuff. But given his Teflon knack in the past, it will have to be very serious to down him and until then, all FF ministers will stay loyal to him.

Having said that the stakes are very high indeed. Ahern’s explanation and clarifications of all the lodgements, the dig-out loans, the whip-arounds and the house purchase have been ropey. And that innate ropiness of his accounts has been exposed on a good few occasions by the persistent if sometimes monotonous questioning of Tribunal lawyer Des O’Neill.

As well, Ahern’s narrative has always been that he has fully complied and cooperated with the Tribunal. Yesterday, we had further reminders that the Tribunal’s own experience is at variance with this. As well as the lateness in disclosing foreign exchange reactions, it emerged yesterday failed in his obligation to include the fact of Celia Larkin’s involvement in an account operating to his benefit in an affidavit of discovery (that’s pretty serious)

Yesterday, after a day and a half of thoroughly exhaustive and exhausting preliminaries, the Tribunal finally turned its attention to the four specific lodgements, and the substantive issues surrounding Mr Ahern.

And the first that has come under scrutiny has been a lodgement of £24,838 in punts in October 1994. Ahern’s version of events is that this is primarily made up of two separate components – the second dig-out loan he got from friends totalling £16,500 in addition to the £8,000 sterling that he was handed after a whip-around by Manchester-based zillionaires sometime in 1994.

All very well until Tribunal lawyers began to do the maths and then discovered that the figures just didn’t tally. The exchange rates of the day just didn’t support the two sources that Ahern claimed for the money. In other words the sterling sum would have to be in pounds and pence.

When it did its own assessment, it found that the sum lodged of 24,838 exactly matched the money you would get if you exchanged £25,000 sterling. That was explosive stuff. If that was the case, it meant that the version of event that Bertie Ahern has put on the public record just wasn’t true, that there was no £8,000 sterling, no £16,500 and that his narrative was a fabrication and – well – a brazen bare-faced lie. And if that were true, or established, or proven, there would be no question but the Taoiseach would fall on his sword. He just couldn’t survive that, politically.

But there was one problem with this theory (and that’s what it is because there are no documents to back up this version of events; or indeed Ahern’s). It assumed that the bank teller had applied a rate that day that was for sums of £2,500 and below, rather than a more favourable rate for larger sums.

“You are saying a person going in with £25,000 gets a rate for £2,500 and is entirely screwed by the bank,” riposted Ahern to O’Neill.

The lawyer pointed out that the same rate for £2,500 was mistakenly applied for a sum of £20,000 Ahern deposited in December 1995, before it was corrected to the appropriate rate.

Hugely coincidental and all as it is, the theory still makes a huge assumption that the teller applied the wrong rate, either deliberately or mistakenly. And the December example isn’t compelling because the mistake was rectified by the bank at the time.

What was lacking yesterday were other comparitors. Surely, an exercise could have been conducted to see if the £2,500 rate was mistakenly applied to sums exchanged by other customers with large amounts around that time.

Overall, the Taoiseach has done himself no favours throughout the process. Everytime he explains, the sands shift a little bit more. A new detail is included. The story is tweaked to address a potential weakness in his version of events. There are new recollections.

There are parts of Bertie Ahern’s account that were not convincing when he first told it and are still not convincing a year later, notwithstanding all the tweaks, elaborations and clarifications.

And besides that, it was morally and ethically iffy for a Minister for Finance to take non-repayable repayable loans from friends and whip-arounds from Manchester businessmen. The sums of money involved were huge, especially if you are one of the little guys on the terraces. But having said all that, there are few who are as expert in the survival business as he is.

INSIDE POLITICS - CELIA LARKIN'S EVIDENCE

Well, what we witnessed yesterday was the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of political evidence.
Early during Celia Larkin’s testimony to the Planning Tribunal yesterday, it was put to her that there were now four different versions of how Micheal Wall had given Bertie Ahern £30,000 and how it came to be lodged into a new bank account opened by her.
All day, despite the glaring inconsistencies between the versions, Celia Larkin insisted that there may indeed be four versions but, like the New Testament and its four Gospels, they may differ in detail but the essence, the truth, will always remain the same.
And every time Tribunal lawyer Henry Murphy dared to ask her about the minutiae of what had occurred, a querulous and testy Ms Larkin responded with the fervour of a Born-Again Christian being challenged on the existence of God.
The Taoiseach’s former ‘life-partner’, as Ms Larkin described herself twice, came into the witness box yesterday with one mission – to show that every penny that she has been asked to administer on behalf of Bertie Ahern and Micheal Wall had been accounted for.
But the problem that Ms Larkin faced is that this is not what the Tribunal is concerned with. It’s investigating where the money came from in the first place, and why it went through such a convoluted series of transactions, being passed through new bank accounts in Ms Larkin’s name, being exchanged back and forth from sterling to Irish punts, and being stashed in hot presses, safes in constituency offices and wardrobes in North Dublin hotel rooms.
Underlying all this, is that notwithstanding Bertie Ahern’s self-projection as anorak man, who cares for nothing other than a game of football and a couple of pints, the sums of money involved were vast. The monies allotted for refurbishment and renovation on an almost-new Drumcondra home (£80,000 in total) would have bought a three-bedroom terraced house in Phibsboro at the time.
What the Tribunal was investigating yesterday were three separate financial transactions that Ms Larkin conducted on behalf of Mr Ahern in late 1994 and in 1995.
The first was the lodgement of the £30,000 sterling that Mr Wall gave to Mr Ahern in early December, ostensibly for renovation and refurbishment of an almost new house that he had not yet fully bought. That was lodged into a new account Ms Larkin opened in December 5 1994.
The second was another account opened by Ms Larkin on the day in her name. That account contained £50,000 that were transferred from two of Mr Ahern’s accounts. Six weeks later, Ms Larkin withdrew the whole lot and gave it to Mr Ahern.
And finally, there was a sum of £10,000 sterling and £2,000 Irish that Ms Larkin into another account in June of 1995.
Ms Larkin’s poise and composure were as immaculate as her appearance. In almost five hours of evidence, there was no stumbling, no ‘ums’ and ‘aws’. She was also (refreshingly) familiar. This wasn’t a strategy. Anything lawyerly will always be po-faced but she brought a degree of levity by insisting on addressing her interrogators Henry and Des, as if she were a primary school teacher gently bringing unruly seven-year olds to order.
Sure, she had a few rough passages. Certainly, there were a couple of elongated pauses when she was faced with complex or tricky questions. But as the day wore on, she became more testy, challenging the basis of a line of enquiry, or accusing Mr Murphy of being pedantic. At one stage, when he accused her of conveniently going blank in her recollection, she acidly responded by asking him could he remember what he did last Friday at 9.02?
But her major problem was this. Why all the different and contradictory versions of the events and the transactions?
“It’s a fairly simple matter; there can not be that much of a mystery to it,” said Mr Murphy at one stage in an obvious piece of observation.
Let’s examine one of the lines of inquiry. Ms Larkin’s first account to the Tribunal was in June 2006 when she supplied it with a memo of her recollection. At that time, she said that Michael Wall had deposited the £30,000 sterling that he said he gave to Bertie for the house.
But subsequently she changed that, and introduced a new narrative. The following month, she was interviewed by Tribunal lawyers. At that stage she said it was she who lodged the money in a new account in her name. And she said that the money was handed to her by Michael Wall in the office of the late Gerry Brennan, Mr Ahern’s solicitor who also acted for Mr Wall in relation to dealings over the house.
And then in July this year, just as she was due to give evidence to the Tribunal, it all changed again. Now she was saying the money had not been handed over in Mr Brennan’s office after all but that she had collected it from Mr Ahern’s constituency office, St Luke’s, and lodged it into the bank.
And then yesterday, there was a further ‘clarification’. Now she remembered that she was in St Luke’s on the Saturday and had witnessed Mr Wall putting the cash on the table and Mr Ahern taking the bundles of sterling and going to a back room to put them into the safe. And then the following Monday, she collected a briefcase and lodged it. Up until now, she had made no mention of witnessing the money being handed over in St Luke’s. But these new details came only a day after Michael Wall had said as much to the Tribunal in evidence.
There were similar inconsistencies in relation to the second account she opened on December 5, the one for £50,000. In earlier evidence and communication with the Tribunal she could not recall exactly how the £50,000 came to be withdrawn in January 1995, only a month later. But in her communication with the Tribunal in July of this year, she remembered that she had collected it in a parcel or a bag. And yesterday for the first time, she recalled that it was Bertie Ahern who had given her the lift to the bank that morning and waited outside in the car. Suddenly the sketch writers in the Tribunal had struck gold – Bertie the Getaway Driver was born.
It was deeply unsurprising that the Tribunal lawyers would hone in on the inconsistencies of the accounts, and the apparent credibility gaps. What was surprising was that Ms Larkin considered this to be deeply surprising, as she objected with increasing force to the minutiae and the forensics.
She was not convincing, however, when explaining how her memory and recollection had improved over the past 15 months. Her strategy was two-fold. She insisted that the first interview by lawyers was informal and an information-gathering exercise. She had talked freely and openly, she insisted, but had only given the gist without going into detail. It was only later that she was able to piece together the rest.
And it was when Bertie Ahern told her that all these events took place on the weekend of his annual fund-raising dinner and on the weekend before he might have been Taoiseach (Dick Spring pulled the plug on that the following Monday morning, she reminded everbody twice) that she remembered everything in more detail.
But that alone couldn’t bring back such a flood of recollection, could it? The most interesting exchange was between her and Judge Gerard Keyes who asked her had anyone assisted her in furnishing the Tribunal with the fuller clarifications. Ms Larkin seemed to suggest conversations with Bertie Ahern but when Judge Keyes probed, all he had reminded her of was that the weekend was the fateful weekend before Dick Spring pulled the plug. Less than convincing, given the extent of the new detail she couldn’t recall last year but could suddenly recall with precision in July of this year and yesterday.
But in the end, there were no torpedoes, no scuppering, no big rips in the Anorak. We just saw more of the ongoing smoke and mirrors show that is Bertie Ahern’s personal finances. The inconsistencies remain. And following Celia Larkin’s evidence, there were the same number of loose ends. We’ll probably have more by the time the Taoiseach himself finishes his testimony on Friday.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIEGATE III

Well if Shrek III, Spiderman III and Pirates of the Caribbean III are in cinemas now, there's no harm in crucifying the long-suffering public with BertieGate III.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into negotiations for Government, you realise that the danger you thought you had disposed of once and for all is still lurking out there in the deep waters.

Of course, this was foreseen. On the first day proper of the election campaign - amid much FF bleating - the Mahon Tribunal decided to suspend its hearings until May 26.

A common interpretation was this - the problem hadn't gone away; it was lurking in the long grass to pounce at the moment that negotiations for government began.

Early in the campaign, many people thought Fianna Fail would be a good few seats short of its 2002 total and, if it had any chance of government, would need to commence long, difficult, and delicate negotiations. These talks would begin just as the Quarryvale II module opened, containing all those details and questions about his personal finances, the house etc.

So thumping was the FF victory - and so well ventilated was Ahern's political difficulties over his personal finance - that you kind of thought that nothing the Mahon Tribunal could come up with yesterday would add to the picture, or create complications for FF.

But it has. Ahern said that Celia Larkin lodged a sum of £30,000 sterling at an AIB bank on O'Connell Street that day. The Tribunal says that only about £1,900 sterling was bought that day. It has also posited a theory that the amount lodged was the exact equivalent of $45,000 - the chances of that being a coincidence were slim he said. But so far there has been no evidence or documentation produced to show that $45,000 was bought in the bank branch that day. That's why Ahern's lawyer, Conor Maguire argued:

"The was a completely fanciful suggestion made without any supporting evidence and without any allegation to that effect having been made to the tribunal."

Still. The fact that less than two grand sterling was transacted that day will cause the Taoiseach some problems. But not too many. All of the allegations bar that one have been in circulation already.

But having said that, those who will strike a deal with FF may seek assurances from Ahern in relation to that transaction and also, some guarantee that something else is not coming down the tracks.

Fine Gael's statement last night was a work of mischief. Penned by Fergus O'Dowd, it was designed to throw the cat in among the pigeons, to sow the seeds of doubt, and to put pressure on those who will do a deal. Of course, Fine Gael itself has a huge interest in this, as it itself wants to form a government.

But sadly this morning it failed to live up to the courage of its convictions when it was unable to provide a spokesperson for Morning Ireland. If you are issuing statements headed...

Tribunal Contradiction of Taoiseach’s Statement Raises Serious Issues

... then you must be willing to have the spine to back it up publicly, as it is a very serious allegation.

Will it affect the talks and the formation of government? It's hard to say. You wonder do the PDs have any appetite for it, or will the Greens (if they're asked) consider it a deal-breaker.

Certainly, it will create a small element of doubt. But Ahern has categorically denied he made a dollar transaction. It will be a longish time before the Tribunal hears evidence from him, and even longer before it issues its report. Assurances will be sought, I'm sure. And assurances will be given, I'm also sure.

And I'm certain too that any obstacles will be overcome in the short term. But sometime in the mid-distance, you can sense that the storms are brewing.

INSIDE POLITICS - THE DEBATE

It’s staggering how often a hugely hyped and over-anticipated event like the World Cup Final has turned into a tense defensive battle.

And in a way so it was in the head-to-head between the two potential Taoisigh of the country, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny last night. Presenter Miriam O’Callaghan described it as the “climax” of the election campaign but you felt that perhaps the denouement will not come until next weekend.

Nevertheless, it was intriguing, somewhat bruising, and told us a lot about the two leaders. It might have lacked the venom and sound-bytes of the previous night, but there was far more engagement on issues with both scoring heavily on key issues.

If there was a winner it was Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who had the edge when it came to challenging Mr Kenny on his health costings, his tax proposals, as well as getting Mr Kenny to admit that his justice spokesman Jim O’Keeffe did not have the correct information at his disposal last week.

The biggest stumbler Mr Ahern faced was when Miriam O’Callaghan prefaced the next section with a reminder that the Government was in power for ten years, had record resources at its disposal but hadn’t delivered on the particular area, be it health, crime or education. On a couple of occasions, he found himself in the uncomfortable territory of admitting that promises had not been achieved.

Mr Kenny showed he has travelled a massive distance in terms of dealing with intensive and detailed debates of this manner. Like Mr Ahern, he relaxed quickly, recovered from any gaffes or admissions, and was assertive without being aggressive.

While acquitting himself well, he found himself very much on the back foot on a few occasions when it came to explaining the details of his promises.

He found himself in difficulties explaining how promises in his contract would be realised – the 2,300 extra hospital beds; the medical cards for under fives in particular. Impossible, said Mr Ahern for both, an argument Mr Kenny never fully managed to nail down. Mr Kenny also never address Mr Ahern’s assertion that FG’s tax policies would most benefit the richest 3%.

His worst moments, surprisingly, came on crime. When it was put to him that his justice spokesman Jim O’Keeffe had admitted there was no increase in crime rate, Mr Kenny had to essentially dress Mr O’Keeffe down on air, with an excuse that Mr O’Keefe did not have the statistics to hand. No matter how he phrased it, it was always going to look bad.

And the Taoiseach also scored heavily with his argument that the 2,000 extra gardai promised by Fine Gael provides funding for only 1,000 plus those who will go into training in Templemore this year. This was a biggie. While the Government has struggled (and arguably failed) to get 14,000 cops by the end of this year, Kenny's plan provides not for 2,000 but for 1,000 extra on top of them. It's promise of 2,000 but based on them being additional to there at the moment not including those in Templemore.

However, for many of the arguments – with both going into detail – the results were marginal or inconclusive. Both men were relaxed but Mr Kenny kept a polite and friendly composure throughout, compared to the edgier and slightly more aggressive pose struck by the Taoiseach.

Mr Ahern did find himself in difficulties on health, especially on a question Ms O’Callaghan asked about cystic fibrosis. Mr Kenny was strong here, especially in his portrayal of the “gargantuan failure” in A&E and primary care, as well as the failure of government to provide 3,000 beds. He also gouged a bit at the edges on the huge amount of public monies that was spent and wasted on PPARS - Mr Ahern's general response about the huge numbers in the health service didn't convince.

On other specific points, he was also able to successfully argue that the Government had failed in its promise to build a metro for Dublin by 2007. He was also marginally stronger on the issues of stamp duty and on quality of life.

The format was as five years ago, with both leaders making a pitch at the start and then debating five pre-agreed topics including health, education, crime, value for money, and the economy.

In his opening response to Ms O’Callaghan the Taoiseach, looking relaxed, spoke about his record over the past ten years and made an effective pitch by pointing to his working class roots in Drumcondra.

The Fine Gael leader immediately confronted by one of his Achilles Hells, lack of ministerial experience, answered confidently by referring to his time as Minister for Trade and the leadership qualities he has shown since becoming FG leader.

When the subject turned to priorities, Mr Ahern said that a strong economy was paramount. Mr Kenny agreed but said that it was the last Fine Gael government which sowed the seeds.

Mr Kenny quickly turned to his contract and his promise that he won’t seek re-election if he doesn’t achieve all its goals. Ms O’Callaghan asked the obvious question about who would judge if he achieved or failed. He answered that it would be self-obvious.

The presenter then honed in on the controversy surrounding Mr Ahern’s finances. Again there were close uncomfortable questions but he answered them relatively comfortably.

“I gave the matters to the Tribunal confidentially. And they were leaked straight out. That was my only objection,” he said.

It was clear that Mr Kenny did not want to engage in this. And it was also clear that the propensity of the debate would remain well-mannered.

As the debate moved to the most fractious issue, the Taoiseach accepted there were issues in A&E and primary care but put it in the context of huge improvements over ten years.

The debate then moved on the economy. Again the exchanges were technical and detailed. Mr Kenny agreed that the Taoiseach had “presided” over a successful economy but argued that Ireland had lost competitiveness. Ahern again referred to the achievements of his Government. This was home turf for him and he easily dealt with the details. Though Mr Kenny showed himself much improved when it came to specific and tricky questions in this area.

Ahern shaded it on the actual debating points. There can't be any doubt about that. But these debates are also about demeanour, composure and delivery. And Kenny never looked like a politician incapable of taking on the role of Taoiseach. Both will take something from it.

INSIDE POLITICS - BIFFO BLASTS BACK

Unless something new comes out in the wash today, the BertieGate saga has now finished as an election issue. Brian Cowen took a couple of questions (they were almost asked as a matter of form) but you realised as soon as he responded that there was no further life left in that dog.

Anyways for an hour before that he had lorded the press conference with a magnificent performance of biff, bluster and bravado. He dissed the opposition's economic policies, claiming that the FF figures all stacked up, and that the opposition would "bust" us.
BertieGate was swept aside by use of the magician's trick of misdirection.

And singlehandedly Cowen changed the direction of the campaign for FF, putting BertieGate behind it, pushing the agenda on. It was his intervention during the great unpleasantness of last autumn that changed course for FF. The more you look at him in this form, the more you think: the leader in waiting.

INSIDE POLITICS - BERTIEGATE; THE END CREDITS

It was – to borrow somebody else’s phrase – the last sting of a dying wasp.

There was no emotional TV interview. There were no catch in the voice. There were no tears. This wasn’t a politician tugging at the heart strings – this was a Taoiseach tugging impatiently at the exit door to leave BertieGate behind once and for all.

And in the end Bertie Ahern got it over with. The comprehensive statement came in a staggered way – the gist of it in a written response to questions in the Sunday Independent; and the whole shebang in a statement delivered at 2pm yesterday – about the only time in the week where the news cycle takes a siesta and gives way to sport. There are no talk shows and consequently the first real parsing of it was on the Week in Politics, late last night.

There were a couple of strange references in the statement that suggest it had been originally written for Ahern to read out.
“I hope you will bear with me as I give you a detailed account of these matters,” is the syntax of talk and not of prose.

But no matter if the strategy chopped and changed. No matter that it was released on the day the latest opinion poll spelt further bad news for Fianna Fail. “You know us, always going against the wind,” said one of its backroom people.

What mattered for Fianna Fail was two things. That it was comprehensive and complete enough for the PDs. The last thing FF wanted was for Michael McDowell to be so scunnered (a nice Scottish word that means very annoyed or devastated) to bring the edifice down. And it was comprehensive and complete enough to draw a line under it, as far as this election cycle was over.

Sure, they’d get another sting off the wasps – the swarm of journalists that is, not the opposition. For the leaders of the main opposition parties have reacted to questions about BertieGate in the way an elderly nun might react to a flasher. Recoil verging on speechlessness has been the standard response. It’s been a textbook example of standing up for your focus group findings.

And it was, in the end, a comprehensive account of the convoluted dealings surrounding his house near Griffith Avenue. It wasn’t just a lawyer putting words into Bertie Ahern’s mouths – there was a human element to it that explained things in a manner that will go down very well with ordinary people.

“I know that some people will fell that some aspects of my life are unusual. I am sorry if that has caused any confusion or worry in people’s minds All of these issues arose in a period when my family, personal and professional situations were rapidly changing.”

Some cynics will say that he has brought the soap opera that is his personal life and family into it, to again elicit a sympathy vote. But there wasn’t overkill. And he confronted the substantial questions relatively head-on, though “unusual” would only be the beginning of some of the aspects and transactions.

But like all Bertie Ahern’s public utterances, this one had its loose threads and its ambiguities. New questions keep cropping up – when one door closes, another opens.

The one thing that he does nails head is the alleged dollar lodgement. The Tribunal lawyers said that the £28,772.90 that Celia Larkin lodged (this was the £30,000 sterling that he says Michael Wall gave him for renovation and for stamp duty) represented the exact sum he would have received that day if he tendered $45,000.

But in his statement yesterday, he said it actually equated to $44,277.68 at the appropriate AIB rate. Either he’s wrong or the Tribunal is wrong. And if the Tribunal is wrong, it’s a fundamental error, especially as it knew that this allegation would be made public before the hearing began. That one has been knocked on the head.

But there are others that remain hanging. Why was that lodgement a mixture of sterling and punts. And that lodgement went through two accounts before going back into his safe in St Luke’s a month or so later. And then it was converted back into sterling for the purposes of paying back Mr Wall but then that didn’t happen and then may or not have been kept in his safe as sterling.

But the longest loose thread is a new one that he brought up yesterday in the interview. Last October, he was asked in the Dail about his tax liability arising out of the Dublin and Manchester dig-outs in 1993.

“I have been separately advised by two eminent tax advisers that I have no tax liability in respect of the Manchester moneys. The funds were from persons based in the Manchester area who are not based in Ireland and, therefore, the sums were not chargeable to gift tax,” he said.

But yesterday, he revealed that he has – on the foot of subsequent advice – made a provisional payment to cover any liability which could arise.

In his doorstep interview, he gave a few more details. He said the issue had arisen as to whether or not Michael Wall had paid UK tax. On that basis, he made a declaration.
“If I owe at the end it will be very little,” he said.

But that’s not the point. He may be opening himself to the charge of misleading – if inadvertently – the Dáil last October when he gave the impression that no tax liability arose. This may come back to haunt him. He was also Minister for Finance at the time – a person whose propriety in all things is supposed to be beyond question.

Privately, the main opposition parties were expected a full-blooded attack yesterday. In the end, it was a tempered statement. There is some ‘Empire Strikes Back’ sallies. He ridicules the allegations of Tom Gilmartin.

There is also dark talk about “malicious leaks” and the agenda to damage him and FF. He lists off the four leaks – including the alleged claims of a Garda driver that came from Fine Gael MEP. Yesterday he made an opaque comment about secret meetings in hotels in west Galway – almost reminiscent of the Famous Five and mysterious midnight activities at ‘smuggler’s cove’. From all that, it’s as plain as a pikestaff that FF believe there’s a vast conspiracy against them and that it’s FG that is behind it.

This whole episode has left a deep well of bitterness in FF. Everybody has had it in for them. The Mahon Tribunal. The alleged clandestine operations of their political opponents. An aggressive media - Ahern yesterday chafed at what he called its “lurid news headlines and copious details of my private life distorted, misrepresented and sensationalised.”

But, even if all that is true – and even if all the details were leaked with malicious intent – the problem for Ahern is that the dig-outs and the arrangements surrounding his house did raise very grave questions that went to his credibility. And in modern democracies, the credibility, honesty and trustworthiness of our politicians – especially our leaders – are paramount. Resent it as they do, it would have been a dereliction for the media to avoid it.

And Ahern has been lucky. In a bigger less personal country like Britain he may not have found understanding or forgiveness. Lucky though that his dig-out was venial compared to the ‘mortallers’ of Charlie Haughey. Lucky too that the people judged that against his undoubted achievements and said that the latter tipped the scales in his favour.

And by tomorrow, when he makes another historic address in Westminster, my guess is that this controversy will have died down and the election agenda will have finally moved on.

However, the last time we heard about the sting of a dying wasp in Ireland (over gangland crime), it turned out to be a singularly unfortunate phrase. This controversy has not gone away, has merely been postponed until polling day. The poison has gone into the bloodstream but there's a long incubation.

This is my piece from today's Irish Examiner.

INSIDE POLITICS - Where is this election going?

The whole BertieGate episode is a complete mess. You have both Government parties in disarray and everything else sidelined. There's been a debate over the past week about whether or not this is a distraction. It's not. Credibility is fundemental in any democracy. If what's captured by that lovely Irish expression, "uisce faoi thalamh" is happening, then the public deserve to know.

Of course, Bertie Ahern feels hard done by. The Mahon Tribunal's timing of Quarryvale 2 was disastrous from his point of view. Once the Sunday Business Post/Barry O'Kelly judgement went against the Tribunal in the Supreme Court, it followed that it was going to be open season in terms of material finding its way into the public domain.

It's uncertain if Ahern made his statement to the Tribunal before or after the Supreme Court judgement or if his statement was distributed to the affected parties before or after that judgement was delivered. It's been reported that his statement was sent 20 people or more who are interested parties in this module. If that's true, he would have been just as well to have perched himself atop the Spire on O'Connell Street and read it out to the populace. In the event, the Tribunal sending a 'desist' letter to the media on Friday (five days after the Irish Mail on Sunday broke the story) was, to put it mildly, a little too late.

INSIDE POLITICS - PDs OUT OF GOVERNMENT

Bertie Gate - The Sequel is the story that keeps on giving.

It's going to take us right into week two of the campaign.

We'll have to wait until tomorrow morning to see the impact of new Sunday newspaper revelations and what the PDs will do.

If the PDs pull out, it will mean little in terms of Government... it's on half-throttle in any instance since the election was called.

But it will leave the PDs very isolated. They will have severed their ties with FF. None of the other parties wants to treat with them. They'll have to make a very good pitch as to why they will be any relevance.

And as for FF. The papers will damage them more. The PDs pulling out will damage them more. The Mahon Tribunal, by timing the Quarryvale 2 module to coincide with the election campaign, may have unwittingly taken the Government down. Everything that is damaging Bertie Ahern is coming from documents that the Tribunal distributed to witnesses and which one of them is now leaking.

INSIDE POLITICS - ELECTION DAY FOUR

It was a strange day today - not too sure whether it was the lull after or before a storm. In terms of activity it was quieter than the first three days and definitely quieter than tomorrow when Fianna Fail and Labour will both launch their manifestos.

Went to the Labour HQ for the first time today. All of the parties have opted for new headquarters away from the satellites of Leinster House. Labour's one is above a Burger King fast food joint in Baggot Street, which makes it the nearest to Leinster House. Both FF and FG are close to the Grand Canal, but still only a couple of minutes if you are bicycle-powered like the Examiner is.

It's amazing the amount of dosh and effort invested by parties in making sure the optics are right. Like football managers and players doing interviews are big games, the background is vitally important. The election slogan is always prominent. The idea is that it's a visual mnemonic - people will see it so often that it becomes embedded. And then the other little details that you hardly notice but which I presume are very important. The FF and FG players all sit at their conferences. At Labour they stand at a transparent podium. You kind of think that's a less comfortable position but it hasn't stopped Rabbitte firing off some great quips this week. He had a great one about Bertie today and how lucky he is (admittedly said out on the stump):

"If he fell off the top of Liberty Hall he would definitely land on his feet."

I'm sure Bertie didn't feel that lucky today. He was going on a walkabout of his own constituency at 12. His handlers had scheduled a doorstep interview at the end of it. Fair enough. But then you realised what part of his constituency it was. It was Henry Street and Moore Street, a veritable sea of people.

It was my first time out on the hustings with Ahern this election and there was a big change from 2002. Then he was mobbed by euphoric crowds: today it was different.

Moore Street is home ground for Fianna Fail leaders. Haughey, Lynch, Reynolds were greeted like Gods there. Bertie even more so. This is his own heartland after all. But he didn't get it all his own way today. There were sporadic heckles coming at him from all sides. The funniest was the wise guy who saw Bertie passing near a fishmonger's stall on Moore Street. "Something fishy Bertie?" this Dylan Moran of Dublin's northside quipped.

The second thing I found a little unsettling was the media presence. There was a swarm of reporters around Ahern, over 50 people certainly. And swarm was the operative word for there was an aggression to the questioning today that I found surprising. There was a time when the political lobby was composed of only four correspondents (The Cork Examiner, The Irish Independent, The Irish Times and the Irish Press) but now there are at least two dozen media outlets who attend the official Government briefing. Today he got a barracking from one or two journalists at the back of the scrum. I wasn't exactly blameless as I was chided by him for being rude after cutting in before he finished a sentence.

The whole BertieGate The Sequel mess has conspired to make a hash of the first four days of Fianna Fail's campaign. On Thursday morning it will launch its manifesto. Despite the multitude of promises made by Ahern in his Ard Fheis speech in late March, it's widely expected that there will be a spectacular crowd-pleaser to divert attention away from all the unpleasant on personal finances.

It has been a distraction but a damaging one for FF. The party has struggled and stumbled over the first four days. It hopes that by the weekend the Tribunal will have worked its way through the system and that normal service can resume.

Which it will, unless some major controversy blows up over the weekend. It will be interesting to see how FF have fared in the polls during the first week. They rebounded like Shaquile O'Neill last October jumping from 35 to 40 per cent in opinion polls - and that's why the opposition has been so reticent to go for the jugular this time in case their harsh words opens the tap of human sympathy for Bertie.

INSIDE POLITICS - Ethics and Pathetics

Something strange happened this week. A Bill was published with less noise and fanfare than you’d get out of a bunch of stiffs in a morgue.

So what’s strange about that? Well, in the normal course of events a Minister will unveil a new piece of legislation as if he’s just personally discovered a new planet in our Solar System, or is about to reveal the Third Secret of Fatima, or has just been announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

And it is especially so if it involves Michael McDowell. On the slightest whim the Tánaiste is wont to hightail it down to Templemore, where he inspects two columns of hastily-assembled trainee gardaí before delivering himself of a Martin Luther King style speech, full of aspiration and determination that his latest get-tough bill will be more get-tough than all the previous get-tough bills.

What went wrong this week when the Ethics Bill was published in an atmosphere of monasterial silence? This wasn’t an ordinary run-of-the-mill Bill. No sirree. This was the extra special Bill that was demanded by Michael McDowell during BertieGate as the quid pro quo for staying in power. This was the pound of flesh; the leash and muzzle on the profligate Fianna Fáilers; the rope that would spancel him from straying over to Manchester for the odd speaking engagement.

It is true that for technical reasons the Department of Finance was the sponsoring department. But there was no press release. There was no announcement on the Departmental website. The Bill was published and posted on the Oireachtas website, ‘snook out’ under the cover of darkness during the Easter weekend.

And what had happened to the Tánaiste. Had he been the unsuspecting victim of a snatch squad of Poor Clare nuns? Had he been struck dumb at the sight of Enda Kenny’s new bouffant quiff? Or had he finally run out of things to say?

And when you parsed the Bill, you began to understand the unusual silence. For far from curbing the spendthrift ways of FF ministers, the Bill increases the value of a gift (including a monetary one) that must be declared by three times. The previous limit had been E635 (and that was included in the 1997 legislation). But the increase of the threshold to €2,000 was an astounding concession. Sure, a politician who gets a loan or dig-out of over €2,000 must first get an opinion (essentially the sanction) of the Standards in Public Office Commission. But one reading of the legislation is that the politician could get a limitless number of dig-outs from Samaritans like Paddy the Plasterer, all below the value of €2,000, and not have to declare them.

It’s an exercise in goal-post shifting. It’s the same with political donations. Gone are the days when parties and politicians could rely on the likes of Ben Dunne being good for a hundred grand. Now a TD must declare a donation over €635, and can’t accept anything over €2,540. A party must declare any loan it receives about 5,078 and can’t accept more than €6,348. What parties have done is gone underground.

Instead of getting a small number of very large donations, they now get a very large number of small donations, none of which are declared. How much do candidates raise? How much do political parties raise? We’re all as much in the dark as we always were.

If you compare the heroic prose of Michael McDowell last October with this wan piece of legislation, you see a credibility gap of Grand Canyon proportions. Last October, it was all about a pound of flesh. Now, the Tánaiste is justifying the rise because of a lamp he received as a gift or cases of wine (must be some wine if it’s worth over E635 a case) he might receive.

Who was calling for this? Nobody. The Standards in Public Office Commission says it received less than one piece of correspondence per year from Government in relation to items that might have exceeded the E635 threshold. Some demand there.

Andrew Rawnsley wrote a majestic piece in the Observer last Sunday on Tony Blair’s decade at the top. One of the points he made in the course of a long piece was that New Labour’s catchy slogan of its three priorities – Education, Education, Education – was just that, a slogan, nothing more.

So many promises founder on the rocks of reality. But with soothing prose, our politicians try to massage and spin it as if the promises were never really made in the first place. Strong ethics legislation. Banning casinos. Café bars. Reducing class sizes. 3,000 hospital beds. Carbon taxes. Decentralisation. Electronic voting.

Between promise and delivery, reality barges rudely into the picture. The determined dream is quietly dropped, or watered down, or parlayed away. The opposition isn’t immune to it either. What’s happened, for example, to Enda Kenny’s Ard Fheis pledge to fine the ‘weekend warriors’, the drunks and fighters who clog up A&E wards? That too was quietly ditched.

It’s as old as humans are. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, especially if they’re worth over €635.

INSIDE POLITICS - Ethics and Pathetics

Something strange happened this week. A Bill was published with less noise and fanfare than you’d get out of a bunch of stiffs in a morgue.

So what’s strange about that? Well, in the normal course of events a Minister will unveil a new piece of legislation as if he’s just personally discovered a new planet in our Solar System, or is about to reveal the Third Secret of Fatima, or has just been announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

And it is especially so if it involves Michael McDowell. On the slightest whim the Tánaiste is wont to hightail it down to Templemore, where he inspects two columns of hastily-assembled trainee gardaí before delivering himself of a Martin Luther King style speech, full of aspiration and determination that his latest get-tough bill will be more get-tough than all the previous get-tough bills.

What went wrong this week when the Ethics Bill was published in an atmosphere of monasterial silence? This wasn’t an ordinary run-of-the-mill Bill. No sirree. This was the extra special Bill that was demanded by Michael McDowell during BertieGate as the quid pro quo for staying in power. This was the pound of flesh; the leash and muzzle on the profligate Fianna Fáilers; the rope that would spancel him from straying over to Manchester for the odd speaking engagement.

It is true that for technical reasons the Department of Finance was the sponsoring department. But there was no press release. There was no announcement on the Departmental website. The Bill was published and posted on the Oireachtas website, ‘snook out’ under the cover of darkness during the Easter weekend.

And what had happened to the Tánaiste. Had he been the unsuspecting victim of a snatch squad of Poor Clare nuns? Had he been struck dumb at the sight of Enda Kenny’s new bouffant quiff? Or had he finally run out of things to say?

And when you parsed the Bill, you began to understand the unusual silence. For far from curbing the spendthrift ways of FF ministers, the Bill increases the value of a gift (including a monetary one) that must be declared by three times. The previous limit had been E635 (and that was included in the 1997 legislation). But the increase of the threshold to €2,000 was an astounding concession. Sure, a politician who gets a loan or dig-out of over €2,000 must first get an opinion (essentially the sanction) of the Standards in Public Office Commission. But one reading of the legislation is that the politician could get a limitless number of dig-outs from Samaritans like Paddy the Plasterer, all below the value of €2,000, and not have to declare them.

It’s an exercise in goal-post shifting. It’s the same with political donations. Gone are the days when parties and politicians could rely on the likes of Ben Dunne being good for a hundred grand. Now a TD must declare a donation over €635, and can’t accept anything over €2,540. A party must declare any loan it receives about 5,078 and can’t accept more than €6,348. What parties have done is gone underground.

Instead of getting a small number of very large donations, they now get a very large number of small donations, none of which are declared. How much do candidates raise? How much do political parties raise? We’re all as much in the dark as we always were.

If you compare the heroic prose of Michael McDowell last October with this wan piece of legislation, you see a credibility gap of Grand Canyon proportions. Last October, it was all about a pound of flesh. Now, the Tánaiste is justifying the rise because of a lamp he received as a gift or cases of wine (must be some wine if it’s worth over E635 a case) he might receive.

Who was calling for this? Nobody. The Standards in Public Office Commission says it received less than one piece of correspondence per year from Government in relation to items that might have exceeded the E635 threshold. Some demand there.

Andrew Rawnsley wrote a majestic piece in the Observer last Sunday on Tony Blair’s decade at the top. One of the points he made in the course of a long piece was that New Labour’s catchy slogan of its three priorities – Education, Education, Education – was just that, a slogan, nothing more.

So many promises founder on the rocks of reality. But with soothing prose, our politicians try to massage and spin it as if the promises were never really made in the first place. Strong ethics legislation. Banning casinos. Café bars. Reducing class sizes. 3,000 hospital beds. Carbon taxes. Decentralisation. Electronic voting.

Between promise and delivery, reality barges rudely into the picture. The determined dream is quietly dropped, or watered down, or parlayed away. The opposition isn’t immune to it either. What’s happened, for example, to Enda Kenny’s Ard Fheis pledge to fine the ‘weekend warriors’, the drunks and fighters who clog up A&E wards? That too was quietly ditched.

It’s as old as humans are. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, especially if they’re worth over €635.