INSIDE POLITICS - GUNFIGHT AT THE O'KEEFFE CORRAL

Harry McGee
On Politics
“This is not personal”, Ned O’Keeffe wrote in the first line of the speech he never delivered on Wednesday night.

The phrase ‘It’s nothing personal’ has long been a cliché in Hollywood movies. It was usually uttered by a man wielding a gun just before he shot somebody. And the point of course was that it was always personal, as personal as it gets.

So when Ned O’Keeffe kicked off by saying it was nothing personal, you knew two things. Firstly, it was personal. Secondly, a political assassination was in the offing.

However, if Ned O’Keeffe’s one-man rebellion is seen as the first move of a political heave against Bertie Ahern, it’s going to be the longest shove in history.

Still, after ten years, there is the first whiff of cordite in the air. Ahern has had a lousy autumn and winter (both personally and politically) but it’s a testament to his complete dominance over his party that you can count the malcontents and mutineers on the fingers of one hand and still have a pinkie to spare.

Ahern has spread his anorak far and wide and given them all jobs to keep them happy. All of the TDS elected in 2002 and before were given some form of job and stipend (as a junior minister, committee chair, vice chair or a whip) with the exception of only two – Ned O’Keeffe and Jim McDaid. It reminds you of the old Balkan saying that goes: Keep your friends close but keep your enemies even closer.

Of course, there are other factors. The primary one is that Ahern – the classic consensus man - has united Fianna Fail in a manner not seen since Lemass and brought the party through three elections all of which provided a windfall of seats.

And his allies (of which he has many: paradoxically he has few close friends in the party) will tell you that the private grumblings of backbenchers are muted and passing – and more often than not relate to a single issue. And they’ll also tell you that the real dissidents are a tiny inconsequential rump. There are no gangs of four, or gangs of 22 or gangs of more than one within FF in the modern era.

His prime ally, naturally, is the man who Ahern has named to succeed him, in the grand Russian/Soviet style of Vladimir Putin and Nikita Khrushcev.

Cowen seems like he is happy to bide his time forever. But in the far distance there are storm clouds brewing and there are other pretenders starting to make subtle (and in Dermot Ahern’s case none-too-subtle) long-distance claim for the throne.

There have been similarities between Ahern’s third term and that of Tony Blair’s but there have also been differences. They have both taken massive hits. For Blair it was Iraq. For Ahern it has been a series of personal issues and uncharacteristic political blunders – especially his cack-handed defence of his extravagant salary.

The differences have been that Blair started his third term with the reforming zeal of the first; with new ideas on health and education reform.

Ahern is not a visionary, was never the creative force within FF (leaving that to others like Charlie McCreevy; Noel Dempsey and – in his one inspired moment on smoking – Micheal Martin). Ahern’s greatest attributes have been his skills as a consensus finder and his extraordinary strategic instinct – Ahern always knew what the party needed to do, and how it need to act, no matter what that situation. And in his third term he has continued on as he did in the first and second – but now there are real signs that that the Anorak that kept him in touch with the common weal is no longer working its magic.
His Tribunal woes could be capable of bringing his career as Taoiseach to a premature end. And we cannot be sure that he will survive intact from all the return visits to the lower yard of Dublin Castle (the next one takes place for two days just before Christmas), especially if new allegations are made.

His own credibility was serious challenged this week when former NCB stockbrokers head Paraic O’Connor told the Tribunal that Mr Ahern’s account of the dig-out loan was untrue insofar as he described him as a friend. That will create real problems for Ahern.

In fairness to Ned O’Keeffe, he had a speech in his hand on Wednesday night that the FF whips never allowed him to deliver during the no-confidence debate..
This is what he would have said: “The current health policy can now be summarised as confrontation, privatisation and Americanisation delivered by only two methods – the national treatment purchase fund and co-location, both, in my view fundamentally flawed.

"World class, centres of excellence, best practice and the messiah from Vancouver all sound great but they are no substitute for lack of capacity in existing hospitals which is the biggest single contributor to the present crisis."

O’Keeffe didn’t solely resign because of perceived slights to him. The health issue also struck a deep cord. Having said that, Ahern’s very generous reaction to his resignation (where he plied him with lavish praise) suggests calves are being fatted even as we speak. But to say that there was nothing personal in his resignation is like saying that if there was a dig-out for Bertie now, Dr John Crown and Tom Gilmartin would be the first two men queueing up to make their contributions.

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 - 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 - ANTI FF BIAS?

I found myself at the wrong end of a Tom McGurk and John Waters onslaught this morning on radio - forced to act, by proxy, as a reluctant defender of the Greens (and I don't think I rounded my thoughts as convincingly as I might have).

But that's besides the point. John Waters has argued that there's an innate and inherent bias against FF in the media and by its commentariat. I'm not sure if that is true. Nor do I believe it's true, as he suggested last week, that very few called it right. There were many other voices in the media who suggested in the run-up to the election that FF would win - though none suggested they would win big.

Most journalists based their predictions (and their analysis) not on any fatuous wish-fulfillment for the soft left or prejudice against FF, but on the only evidence that was available to them - the opinion polls. The same polls waxed and waned during the 25 days of the campaign. And it meant that many journalists, who are creatures of the moment, swayed with whichever way the wind was blowing. In the main, the writing reflected this flux and the volatility (and I'm including my own in this). Sure there's a question about our almost craven reliance on opinion polls. And perhaps, in retrospect, journalists over-estimated the impact of the BertieGate allegations. But that's a reflection (sadly) of superficiality - not of any deep-seated ideological prejudice. And, what nobody predicted, even FFers themselves, was the sheer ease of the FF victory.

Sure, it's undoubtedly true that a number of journalists and commentators wanted FF out or wanted FG or Labour or the Greens in (and maybe that was reflected in their copy). But a majority? No way. To be sure, does the portrayal of the media as a homogeneous Dublin 4 smoked salmon set hold any water any more? Has the media really been stuck in some Palestinian scarf time warp while the real Ireland has moved on with real life? Hardly.

The under-reckoning (by everybody) of FF's stunning support level will need a fair deal of parsing. Sure, I agree totally with John Waters that there's a disconnect between what the media are clearly very interested in (Bertie's finances) and what the public are clearly not all interested in (Bertie's finances).

But, in all seriousness, could journalists have ignored or downplayed that story during the campaign, once the material got into the public domain? Sure, the timing was horrible for FF and for Ahern. Sure, he argued trenchantly that the circumstances surrounding his house rental and purchase were completely unconnected to the claim by Tom Gilmartin (one that's categorically disputed by Ahern) that Owen O'Callaghan had given Ahern £80,000. The timing and nature of the leaks was very unfair. It's also true to say that whoever was behind the leads was intent on damaging him politically.

But irrespective of source or motive, once the details about his house leaked out (especially the non-salary monies that were given to him, or passed through his hands) it would have been remiss of the media not to ask the kind of questions that journalists have asked since time immemorial, without fear or favour.

I don't think Waters was arguing against that, rather saying that the over-concentration on this (to the exclusion of everything else) placed a mote in the eye when it came to the mood, sentiments, and views of the electorate. And that, of course, is self-evidently true.

INSIDE POLITICS - ELECTION DATE

Mondays in Leinster House are as quiet as a country graveyard. Usually. Not this week. Already we're just a couple of hours into the week and the usual trickle of Monday-morning emails have turned into a torrent.

As has the weather. Labour launched its new advert campaign in driving rain. It's based around the theme of 'The First 100 Days'. This was originally an American concept. When there was a change in regime or administration, the acid test was how active they had been in fulfilling their promises in the first 100 days. The week before last, virtually every major American media organisation did the same for Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, who gained control of the Upper House. (see Labour's 10 promises here).

If you parse this morning's papers, the story count for political stories is high. Two opinion polls were published yesterday. Expect them to become an almost daily occurrence between now and election day.

Both polls in the Sunday Indepedent and the Sunday Business Post give mildly good news for Fine Gael and show some slippage in Fianna Fail support.

Both polls have added to the slew of speculation around Leinster House about when the election will be held. With FF faltering a bit in the polls, there's a nervousness creeping into its backbenches, with a sense that most TDs want Bertie Ahern to call an early election.

The longer they go on, the more that malaise and uncertainty will creep in, they say. They are also worried about the potential damage that may be shipped by Fianna Fail and by Mr Ahern from the Quarryvale module of the Tribunal - Tom Gilmartin is due to give evidence this week.

Most think that it will be held on Thursday May 24. That would mean the election would be called next week. That would allow the passage of the Criminal Justice Bill and also allow Bertie Ahern to bask in the glow of Northern devolution.

I had a hunch that it would be held a week later, and that the reason that Ahern was holding it on a Thursday was to allow people get away for the June Bank Holiday weekend. Like a lot of my hunches, I think it's wrong.