MR Fergus Finlay, programme manager to the Tanaiste, has expressed his anger at "grubby attempts" to link Mr Spring and Mr Quinn with the controversy surrounding an advertising contract with QMP. One of the QMP agency's directors is Mr Conor Quinn, a brother of the Minister for Finance.
He said: "Dick Spring had no act or part in this appointment one way or the other. He never served on any of the committees involved and neither did Ruairi Quinn." Mr Finlay added that the awarding of the contract had been announced "publicly and openly" at the time in a press release from the Department of Equality and Law Reform.
In an interview yesterday on RTE Radio's News At One, Mr Finlay said that in December 1993, the Department invited six of the country's leading advertising agencies to tender for a contract. He was asked, along with others, to serve on a committee to evaluate the tenders.
These were reduced to three and they made a further presentation at which the Minister for Equality and Law Reform, Mr Taylor, attended. One company was eliminated. QMP, in terms of overall quality and presentation, had made an outstanding presentation but Mr John Fanning, the managing director of McConnells, had made an equally brilliant and valuable analysis of the strategic issues underlining the campaign, said Mr Finlay.
It was felt that the two agencies should work together on the campaign. But in April 1994 the agencies said they would prefer if one of them was appointed. On that basis, the group recommended to Mr Taylor in May that QMP should be appointed. However, the Minister did not act on it because of Supreme Court litigation on the challenge to the Judicial Separation Act, which meant that it was not possible to set a referendum date.
Subsequent events, including the change of government at the end of 1994, effectively delayed the appointment further, Mr Finlay added. The key point, he said, was that the recommendation was made by the group unanimously to Mr Taylor, and accepted by him, a full year before Mr Conor Quinn's letter.
Over the next year he had kept in occasional touch with Mr Quinn about issues that were arising. I don't think that he would have been in any doubt whatever that his company had made the best presentation," said Mr Finlay. "That was clear, I think from the contacts that we had when we were trying to encourage him and McConnells to work together and it was clear really from the time the original presentations were made.
When the new Government took over it was decided to establish a Cabinet sub committee to conduct the overall referendum campaign, and Mr Taylor asked it to review all the preparations that had been made, including the choice of an advertising agency since no contract had ever formally been offered to QMP.
QMP and McConnells made their presentations again, and the sub committee saw no reason whatever to change the original decision, said Mr Finlay.
The key point, he said, was that in every contact he had with Mr Conor Quinn he was operating on the basis of a decision made a full year earlier and accepted by the Minister. This decision had been documented and duly noted.
Asked by the interviewer Sean O'Rourke, if McConnells was made aware of this before it was asked to make a presentation on June 22nd, Mr Finlay replied: "It appears not."
He said that he had looked at the file yesterday morning and it appeared that the other agencies that had made presentations were written to and for some reasons McConnells was not.
Asked if they would be justified in claiming that they were "patsies", Mr Finlay replied: "Well, I think they would be justified in claiming that they hadn't been treated with the courtesy that they should have been treated with at the end of the day, particularly in view of the outstanding presentations they had made."