Cosgrave admits he defrauded Revenue

FLOOD TRIBUNAL: Former Fine Gael senator Mr Liam Cosgrave has admitted deliberately defrauding the Revenue Commissioners, and breaking solicitors' accounting procedures in relation to a payment he received from Mr Frank Dunlop.

Mr Cosgrave also admitted using the account of a dead client in his solicitor's practice to conceal the £1,815 payment from Mr Dunlop in September 1997.

He has claimed the money was paid for legal fees, but Mr Dunlop says it was a political donation.

In brief remarks at the end of yesterday's evidence, Mr Cosgrave conceded that his political career was effectively at an end. He stood over his work as a public representative, but the public hearings of the tribunal had done "irreparable damage" to his reputation.

He instructed his barrister not to ask questions of him.

Earlier, Mr Cosgrave agreed with Mr Colm Allen SC, for Mr Dunlop, that he had used an elaborate scheme for the "trousering" of the 1997 payment.

Mr Allen reminded the witness he was a member of the Law Society and an officer of the courts.

Mr Cosgrave also conceded for the first time there was corruption in planning in Dublin, and that some of the evidence given by Mr Dunlop was correct.

Asked whether Mr Dunlop was telling the truth about the existence of corruption, he replied: "In some instances, yes".

However Mr Cosgrave said he had no evidence of corruption, and there was none in his dealings with the system.

He also denied concealing his belief in the existence of corruption from the tribunal or a Fine Gael inquiry held three years ago.

Mr Allen said this was the first time Mr Cosgrave had told the tribunal there was corruption in the planning system. Mr Dunlop had undergone a "torrid" cross-examination for eight days by Mr Cosgrave's counsel without this ever being suggested.

Mr Cosgrave accepted that his and Mr Dunlop's evidence on this matched. But he declined Mr Allen's invitation to apologise to Mr Dunlop.

Asked by Mr Allen how he came to the belief that there was corruption, Mr Cosgrave replied that he had heard rumours.

He wasn't aware of any allegations about his colleagues on the county council now.

Mr Allen said the witness had told the tribunal he had not heard about allegations of corruption in the planning system until recently.

Mr Cosgrave was an experienced politician; he was no "neophyte" who had "come down in the last shower". He asked if Mr Cosgrave seriously expected people to believe that he had known nothing about corruption in planning, or allegations of this. Since the 1980s, "the dogs in the street" had been barking about corruption in planning.

It was "literally incredible" that this answer had been true and correct. It was about as realistic as "the notion that a flock of turkeys would vote for an early Christmas".

Mr Allen pointed out that Mr Cosgrave had been a member of the Oireachtas that set up the tribunal.

Did he not see the contradiction in voting for a tribunal to investigate something that he didn't know existed?

He said Mr Cosgrave's evidence had shown that he concealed at least one payment received from Mr Dunlop from the Fine Gael inquiry in May 2000.

Yet the report of the inquiry, which found that it could not come to a "definitive conclusion" in relation to Mr Cosgrave, provoked outrage from the former senator, Mr Allen said.

Counsel read from a letter Mr Cosgrave sent to the then Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, after the report was published.

In this he expressed his "shock and incredulity" at the report. He conveyed his "deep anger" at a "wholly unwarranted and unjustified attack on my good name" and predicted it would become a "serious embarrassment" to the party. "As a consequence, I have been greatly prejudiced, perhaps irreparably, in the eyes of the public."