Funds to purchase St Luke's were raised at meeting of 24 businessmen

THE FUNDS to purchase St Luke’s, Bertie Ahern’s constituency office, were raised at a meeting of 24 businessmen in the Gresham Hotel in Dublin in December 1987, the tribunal heard yesterday.

Joe Burke, St Luke’s trustee and chairman of the Dublin Port Company, said there was a meeting in the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street, where the businessmen discussed the raising of funds to purchase St Luke’s in Drumcondra.

Some 24 “settlers” agreed to pay £5,000 each, at a rate of £1,000 a year for five years, Mr Burke said.

Counsel for the tribunal Des O’Neill SC, asked Mr Burke if details of the contributors had been provided to Fianna Fáil.

Mr Burke said they had not. “Those people who contributed at the time . . . contributed on a confidential basis only,” he said.

“There was no need for anybody to keep records going back all those years. But in hindsight, if we all thought we would wind up in Dublin Castle 20 years on, we certainly would have kept them.”

Mr O’Neill said there was no evidence in the CODR account, supposedly set up to collect the money to pay for St Luke’s, of annual payments over a five-year period.

“Some people paid it all in advance, some people paid £1,000 or £2,000 and then didn’t pay anything, stopped paying,” Mr Burke said.

“Some people . . . paid extra with the understanding that when we got all the funds in, or the funds that we needed, that we would pay them back . . .”

In earlier evidence, Liam Cooper, treasurer of the Dublin Central constituency, said he was also aware of the Gresham Hotel meeting.

He wasn’t at the meeting himself, he said, but after he was questioned about it by tribunal counsel in private session, he was told that it had happened.

Counsel questioned Mr Burke about transactions in the B/T account, set up by St Luke’s trustee Tim Collins, in the Irish Permanent Building Society in Drumcondra in 1989 to fund work on St Luke’s.

Mr O’Neill said £20,000 was withdrawn from the account in August, 1994.

A lodgement of £20,000 was made two months later, in October, and according to bank documentation, emanated from a sterling transaction.

Mr Burke said the £20,000 was withdrawn in cash to pay a builder for work on St Luke’s.

Mr O’Neill asked why it needed to be in cash.

“The old saying is very simple, it’s always nice to see the colour of your money,” Mr Burke said.

He held the money in his safe for two months, he said, but did not engage a builder. He then decided it should be re-lodged.

He had spent some of the original cash, he said, and may have used sterling to replace it, which he kept in his safe to buy bric-a-brac in England for his pub refurbishment business. Sterling was on a par with Irish pounds at the time, he said.

Mr Burke said he put the £20,000 in an envelope and left it to be collected by Mr Collins, who was to lodge it to the B/T account.

However, he did not tell the person he gave it to what the envelope contained.

Mr O’Neill said there was no logical reason to conduct business that way and it seemed extraordinary to him.

“There’s loads of things in life that are extraordinary, but I wouldn’t want to explore them here today, but it wasn’t extraordinary to me,” Mr Burke replied.