Bertie Ahern made false claims about the inquiry he conducted, writes Vicent Browne.
Bertie Ahern's handling of the appointment of Ray Burke to the cabinet in June 1997 involved a combination of feebleness, falsification and duplicity. He fully deserves the political predicament this, belatedly, has brought upon him now.
The feebleness arises from his inability to say no to Ray Burke - who had been an able spokesman on foreign affairs over two years in opposition - after it became known in June 1997 that Burke had received a donation in 1989 of £30,000 (the equivalent today of around €100,000) and that the donor, Joseph Murphy Structural Engineering, was denying it.
The falsification arises from the claim by Bertie Ahern that he had made a thorough investigation into the background to the payment. It is not that he made no effort to enquire about that donation. Apparently, he asked the Garda in June 1997 if they had anything on Burke and on being told that they didn't, he was satisfied.
But there was an elementary check he could and should have undertaken which he didn't bother to make, which makes nonsense of his claims to have done everything he could to explore the background to the payment (remember "up every tree in north county Dublin").
Mary Harney told the Flood tribunal in 1999 that before Burke's appointment to the cabinet Bertie Ahern told her Burke had got £30,000 from JMSE in June 1989 and had passed £10,000 of this to Fianna Fáil. The claim that £10,000 of the £30,000 had been passed on supposedly took some of the harm out of the transaction.
It is obvious Bertie Ahern did not bother checking the claim that Burke had passed over £10,000 to headquarters, for had he asked the party's former director of finance, Sean Fleming, he would have been told that Burke did indeed pass over £10,000 to headquarters in 1989, but that was from another £30,000 donation he had received - from Tony O'Reilly's Fitzwilton group (and what lies behind that donation remains a fascination). So a query about that would have uncovered that Burke had got £60,000 in June 1989 - actually he got at least £95,000, for he had got a further £35,000 from Oliver Barry (£95,000 being the equivalent in value today of well over €250,000).
How conceivably could Bertie Ahern have claimed to have made any credible inquiry into the allegations then circulating about Ray Burke without checking Burke's claim to have handed over the £10,000 to Fianna Fáil?
Perhaps the most damning of Bertie Ahern's actions concerned the run-around he gave his colleague, Dermot Ahern. He sent Dermot Ahern to London to see Joseph Murphy jnr of JMSE some days before the formation of the government in June 1997. Dermot Ahern was asked to find out from JMSE if there was anything to the rumours circulating about Ray Burke having accepted a corrupt payment from JMSE in 1989. If that exercise were to have any point, surely Dermot Ahern should have been briefed on what Ray Burke had said - i.e. that he had received £30,000 in June 1989 as a political donation from JMSE.
Dermot Ahern returned to say that JMSE was saying it had given no money to Burke. Then when Joseph Murphy jnr arrived in Dublin a few days later and contacted Dermot after the formation of the cabinet, Bertie advised Dermot to see Joseph again to find out what he could - again without Dermot being told by Bertie what he knew. That concealment was duplicitous.
So it is not a question of hindsight, or 20/20 vision or "if only we knew then what we knew now" and all that diversionary blather.
Bertie Ahern knew full well in June 1997 that Ray Burke got the present day equivalent of €100,000 from the engineering firm JMSE and he knew JMSE was lying about it. But he still went ahead and appointed Ray Burke minister for foreign affairs, he made false claims about the investigation he conducted and he behaved duplicitously towards Dermot Ahern.
AMONG the questions that Bertie Ahern will not answer in the Dáil debate today are the key questions related to his handling of the Burke affair:
How did you think there was nothing disturbing about a donation of such a size especially when the donor company was lying about the donation and you knew that?
How do you explain the claims you made about the thoroughness of your investigation when you failed to take the elementary step of checking the truthfulness of Ray Burke's claim to have passed over £10,000 of the JMSE £30,000 to Fianna Fáil headquarters?
Why did you fail to tell Dermot Ahern what you knew of the JMSE payment to Burke, when you sent him to see JMSE to inquire about the affair?
Just one further point: it is simply unfair to denigrate everything Ray Burke did as a politician. For instance, he ended the export credit insurance cover for the export of beef to Iraq in 1989 after he took over the industry and commerce portfolio from Albert Reynolds and his antagonism towards RTÉ when he was minister for communications was inspired, at least in part, by the machinations of a secret band of "Stickies", who did more damage to RTÉ than anything he did.
vbrowne@irish-times.ie