The Taoiseach's account of what he knew about payments involving Mr Ray Burke has been contradicted by the former minister for foreign affairs in evidence to the tribunal.
In June 1997, Mr Burke gave Fianna Fail a bank draft for £10,000, which was part of a £30,000 donation he received from Rennicks Manufacturing. In the same month, however, he also received a £30,000 payment from JMSE, and this was widely assumed to be the source of the payment to Fianna Fail when this first emerged.
Mr Burke yesterday denied telling Mr Ahern the money came from JMSE. The £10,000 went in with a compliment slip indicating the name of the donor company (Rennicks), he said.
"I never gave the leader of Fianna Fail any impression that was otherwise," he said. He could not have given Mr Ahern the impression that the money came from JMSE because "knowledge of that was already in Fianna Fail headquarters".
However, Mr Ahern told the Dail in May last year that it wasn't until March 1998 that he learned that the money came from Rennicks. "Up to then, I had been given to understand that the £10,000 received by Fianna Fail from Ray Burke in 1989 was drawn from a contribution he received from JMSE . . . it was reasonable to presume that, in the main, it came from that source," the Taoiseach said.
It was one of the few occasions during Mr Burke's four days in the witness-box when his contacts with the Taoiseach were touched upon in any detail. Asked why he hadn't mentioned the £10,000 draft in a statement he made in August 1997, Mr Burke said he didn't want to "expose the Taoiseach to the embarrassment of the fact that that had been sent in to Fianna Fail headquarters and the source of those funds was well known to Fianna Fail headquarters".
There was a clear indication yesterday that the former Fianna Fail politician is in discussions with the Revenue Commissioners in relation to the large sums of money he collected before the 1989 general election.
On several occasions, Mr Burke declined to answer questions relating to his private tax and income affairs, saying these were personal to him and the Revenue.
In a day-long cross-examination by Mr Gogarty's lawyer, Mr Frank Callanan SC, the focus once again was on Mr Burke's remarkably successful personal fundraising methods as well as those employed by Fianna Fail in general.
Mr Burke said political fundraising was "ongoing" but he never personally sought a political donation. Unsolicited, the contributions appeared to pour in, especially in 1989.
One of these was the Rennicks payment. When Fianna Fail asked the company for the donation they were expecting, they were told the money had already been paid to Mr Burke. He was contacted by party headquarters and told to cough up.
Mr Burke obtained the draft for £10,000 and presented it to party officials at a fundraising lunch in the Westbury Hotel on June 8th, 1989. When it was discovered that he was paying only part of the money, he was confronted with a demand for the balance.
"I said: `that's as much as you're getting. Good luck', " Mr Burke recounted in evidence yesterday.
Fundraising was all "a question of perception of access", he said. You didn't make it a practice to discuss the political donations you were receiving, not even with your own party or political colleagues.
Mr Callanan asked Mr Burke about his assertion that his political and personal lives were "seamless". "You held yourself free to apply money for any personal purpose," Mr Callanan claimed.
Mr Burke said he had spent some of the money raised on political campaigning, he had lodged some, and some monies remained unspent. He told Mr Callanan that most of the money received from JMSE was lodged in a deposit account in June 1989, then transferred to his current account with the Ulster Bank in 1993.
"You spent the money as anyone who has a current account spends it," Mr Callanan said.
Mr Burke explained that part of the money went on buying a car. He had lost his State car with the change of government and needed transportation.
It also emerged that when Mr Burke told the Dail in September 1997 that £30,000 was the largest contribution he had ever received, he had in mind not two, but three separate donations of this kind.
These were the JMSE payment in June 1989, the Rennicks payment made several days earlier, and a third donation from a prominent businessman made on May 30th. This was actually for £35,000, but at the time Mr Burke said he remembered it as £30,000. It was only when he clarified it later with the donor that he realised he had received more.
Mr Callanan asked about Mr Burke's revelation of last week that he had made two lodgments of £60,000 and £35,000 to an overseas account in Jersey in 1984. How large was the biggest donation received on this occasion, he wanted to know.
Mr Burke replied that there was no sum greater than £35,000. Further questions on the size of the largest donation were ruled out by the chairman after a number of legal interventions. On his final day in the witness-box, Mr Burke recovered some of the poise that was missing before the weekend. Mr Burke had scarcely departed before the lawyers for JMSE and Mr Gogarty were locked once again in their traditional adversarial roles. Problems with the production of documents from JMSE mean that none of the 19 Murphy witnesses can be heard this week.
The tribunal is seeking to have the evidence of Mr Joseph Murphy snr, the octogenarian millionaire owner of JMSE, taken by video-link from his home in Jersey. Mr Murphy is well enough to give evidence but not well enough to travel but the option of moving the tribunal temporarily to the Channel Islands is seen as too expensive.