A pattern of slow retreat in the face of damaging media disclosures and political pressure has characterised this Government's response to demands for a full investigation into donations by big business to politicians and political parties. Yesterday, the Government took a further step backward when it offered to amend the Tribunals of Inquiry Acts so that Mr Justice Flood could investigate the motives behind any payments made to Mr Ray Burke while he held a position as government minister. But, even there, the retreat was grudging and oblique. The Government inquiry was to focus on the "motives of the donors", rather than on whether decisions by Mr Burke in government could - in the words of the Opposition motion - have been influenced in any way by payments he or the Fianna Fail Party had received.
Proving the motives of a donor is a far more difficult task than drawing inferences from skewed ministerial decisions. The difficulties that could emerge in that regard were paraded before the Dail yesterday when Mr David Byrne of Rennicks (a Fitzwilton subsidiary) and the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, were seen to disagree over the £30,000 payment to Mr Burke. Mr Byrne had asked for a retraction of the Taoiseach's statement that he (Mr Byrne) had initially denied any payment was made to Mr Burke; Mr Ahern responded by saying that not only had Mr Byrne denied the payment had been made but he had threatened Fianna Fail with an injunction if it proceeded with its affidavit to the Flood Tribunal drawing attention to the payment.
The Taoiseach also entered a stout defence to the claim that Dick Spring had told him, last September, of the details of an anonymous note linking Rennicks to a £30,000 payment to Mr Burke. It didn't happen, Mr Ahern insisted. And he suggested that Mr Ruairi Quinn should correct the Dail record in that regard. But that was as good as it got for Mr Ahern. The Taoiseach failed to bridge the gap between his Dail statement of last week, in which he created the impression of having provided additional information to the Flood Tribunal, and his failure to appraise it of the fact that the sum of money given to Mr Burke by Rennicks was £30,000 and not the £10,000 that appeared on the Fianna Fail receipt.
The Coalition Government sowed the seeds of its present discomfiture when it refused to countenance a full investigation of the Ansbacher accounts, by the Moriarty Tribunal, last September. Having adopted limited terms for the tribunal, the Government declined to allow it to carry out a preliminary investigation of Mr Burke's affairs. In defence, it maintained that terms of reference for a tribunal, once set, could not be changed by the Oireachtas. Fresh disclosures about Mr Burke, forced the establishment of the Flood Tribunal. Since then, in defence of its increasingly threadbare position, the Government was forced to pass a new Tribunal Act to give Mr Justice Flood fresh powers. And another Tribunal Bill now threatens. All because of an unwillingness to name law-breaking Ansbacher account holders before a tribunal.
A separate investigation into the Ansbacher accounts by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment is now producing what the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, yesterday described as "new and disturbing information". But there is no certainty that material will ever enter the public domain. The Government was wrong in not adopting a more robust and transparent approach to the relationship between business and politics, last September. It has suffered from that basic misjudgement ever since.