€17m in payments alleged, says Taoiseach

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern yesterday said allegations about payments to him totalling more than € 17 million have been made in private to the Mahon tribunal.

Mr Ahern listed a number of payments he is alleged to have received, most of which have not been mentioned in public before.

"One allegation is that I got €15 million, another was that I got €1.5 million, another was that I got €500,000, another was that I got €150,000, another one was €30,000."

He said all of these payments were alleged to have come from Owen O'Callaghan, the Cork property developer who was developing the Quarryvale or Liffey Valley shopping centre in west Dublin in the early 1990s.

In its opening statement on the Quarryvale module in November 2005, the tribunal mentioned two payments alleged to have been made to Mr Ahern.

It said that Mr O'Callaghan's one-time partner in the Quarryvale project, Tom Gilmartin, had told the tribunal that Mr O'Callaghan had said to him that he had given money to Mr Ahern on two occasions, the amounts being £50,000 and £30,000. It also said Mr Ahern had said he never received the money and Mr O'Callaghan had said he had never given it.

All of these statements were made to the tribunal in private session. Public hearings into this Quarryvale module have not yet been held because of a challenge in the High Court by Mr O'Callaghan and others.

The other amounts referred to yesterday by Mr Ahern were not mentioned in the opening statement.

Mr Ahern also referred yesterday to a claim made to a newspaper in 1999 by a Cork businessman, Denis O'Brien, that he, Mr O'Brien, had given Mr Ahern £50,000 on behalf of Mr O'Callaghan. This claim fell apart when Mr Ahern took a successful libel case against Mr O'Brien in the Circuit Court. The judge stated that Mr O'Brien's claim was "utterly, absolutely and completely false and untrue".

In a strong public statement in 2000, Mr Ahern said: "I can say I never received one penny from Owen O'Callaghan, for myself, for the party, or for anyone else . . . I never got money anywhere else either for anything to do with Owen O'Callaghan."

Mr O'Callaghan has also said publicly that he never gave money to Mr Ahern.

Yesterday's report in The Irish Times concerned payments to Mr Ahern in 1993 that the tribunal noted while examining his bank accounts as part of its confidential inquiry into the Quarryvale allegations. The existence of the payments had not been published before. As Mr Ahern explained yesterday, to prove his innocence he gave the tribunal his bank accounts going back to the 1980s.

This led to the tribunal asking about the 1993 payments. The tribunal was told money was used to settle legal bills Mr Ahern had incurred at around this time and that it came from four friends of his. "I gave [ the tribunal] all the information about my separation case and all the information about my legal fees, and how I funded everything. These are personal matters," Mr Ahern said

Yesterday's report said the total involved is understood to be between €50,000 and €100,000.

Mr Ahern said that "a lot of what is on the front of the paper is absolutely correct . . . except for the figures - the figures are off the wall".