Ahern says he may have met Gilmartin

The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, has accepted for the first time that he may have met property developer Mr Tom Gilmartin along with other ministers in Leinster House in February 1989.

Although he said he had no recollection of such an event, Mr Ahern conceded that an "informal gathering" may have taken place between Mr Gilmartin and ministers in Mr Charles Haughey's cabinet, as Mr Gilmartin has claimed.

Mr Ahern told the tribunal yesterday he had tried to rack his brains about the alleged meeting. There was no reference to it in his diaries. If there had been an official meeting of ministers, it would have been in his diary.

He said Mr Gilmartin appeared to be talking about a meeting in the 1960s office block in Leinster House where parliamentary meetings of the Fianna Fáil Party were held. He could well understand someone getting lost in the "maze" of Dáil Éireann but he had no recollection of ministers meeting anyone there.

But he conceded "it could have happened". By this he meant the kind of meeting where "someone knocks on the door of your office and asks you to say hello" to a visiting delegation or parish group, he explained. Mr Ahern said he would have had 20 "sessions like that before breakfast".

He said the then Taoiseach, Mr Haughey, would never have just sat down in a room off a corridor for a meeting. He was too formal for that; ministers would have to meet him in his office.

Mr John Gallagher SC, for the tribunal, pointed out that former minister Ms Mary O'Rourke, had a "clear recollection" of a meeting between ministers and Mr Gilmartin in Leinster House. Another witness, Ms Freda Kelly, had said that another minister, the late Mr Brian Lenihan, had told her he attended such a meeting. Given this evidence, Mr Gallagher asked, did Mr Ahern accept that Ms O'Rourke's recollection of the meeting was "probably accurate?"

Mr Ahern replied that if counsel was saying that there was some "casual chit-chat" between a few ministers, where Mr Pádraig Flynn pulled in a few ministers to meet Mr Gilmartin, then "these kind of issues happen on the hour every day".

"So you accept that an informal meeting could have happened as described by Mr Gilmartin and Ms O'Rourke?" Mr Gallagher then asked.

Mr Ahern said he objected to the word "meeting". However, he agreed that an "informal gathering" could have happened.

He pointed out that if Ms O'Rourke had gone out the door described by Mr Gilmartin in his evidence, "she would have fallen off the first floor, because there is none". The two witnesses had described two different locations.

But if he was being asked whether it was possible that Mr Gilmartin was brought in to Leinster House by someone and brought on to the ministerial corridor and that someone caught a few ministers who shook hands and said hello, the answer was "of course, of course," the Taoiseach said.

Delegations about "every project you can think of" would be "coming and going" in the Dáil, he said. It was a "regular occurrence" for a ministerial colleague to pull people in to get them to shake hands with people. But there was "not a hope" of him remembering such engagements, he said. The only thing he would do in such cases was "shake hands".

He agreed with Mr Gallagher that Ms O'Rourke's recollection had been "very clear", even though she said she had only been present at the meeting for a short time. Mr Ahern said he might have been in five seconds before her and have stayed five seconds after her.

"So you're not disputing that such a casual encounter might have taken place and that you don't recall it," Mr Gallagher said.

Mr Ahern said he wasn't going to say it was a meeting. And he declined to agree with Mr Gallagher that it happened "on the balance of probability". Mr Gilmartin and Mrs O'Rourke had given differing evidence and "you couldn't draw a probability from two opposites".