COUNSEL FOR Bertie Ahern claimed in the High Court yesterday that the Taoiseach could not be made accountable to the planning tribunal for any utterance he made in the Dáil about matters being investigated by the tribunal or otherwise, writes Vincent Browne.
Reliance was placed on Article 15.13 of the Constitution which states: "The members of the Houses of the Oireachtas shall not, in respect of any utterance in either House, be amenable to any court or any authority other than the House itself."
If this argument is successful - and it would seem from previous cases that it is likely to be successful - it means that Ahern can be required, only by the Dáil, to answer questions about previous statements he made to the Dáil. But, curiously, the contention of Ahern's Fianna Fáil colleagues, the insipid Green Party and the posthumous Progressive Democrats, is that the proper place for him to answer questions about what he has said in the Dáil is not the Dáil itself, as Ahern's lawyers are arguing in the High Court, but at the planning tribunal.
Indeed, it seems that Ahern himself will claim this, while, simultaneously, claiming the opposite at the Four Courts. The Dáil is entitled, anyway, to take into consideration revelations made at a tribunal to determine whether he is a fit person to remain as Taoiseach. It need not wait for the conclusion of the tribunal's proceedings or the publication of the tribunal report to make its own judgment.
All the more so since it is not necessary to weigh up Ahern's evidence against the evidence of others; reliance on Ahern's evidence alone will suffice to raise the issue of his fitness for office.
Take a few examples. On September 2006, the day after he gave the famous TV interview to RTÉ's Bryan Dobson, he said in the Dáil in reference to the "dig-out loans" he got from friends: "They [ the friends] put pressure on me to accept these donations and I did.
"I only accepted them, after some considerable time, as loans with interest."
Nowhere in his evidence to the tribunal did he say that he was pressurised over "some considerable time" to accept these donations/loans. On the first loan, allegedly received on December 27th, 1993, this came to him out of the blue and he accepted £22,500 immediately in a private meeting between his then solicitor, Gerry Brennan, and himself in his constituency office, St Luke's. Some of the other friends were in another room but the handover occurred in private and there was no lapse of "some considerable time". Yes, he said there was an earlier proposition about a fundraising dinner which he rejected, but no evidence that there was any pressure to accept the money, once raised. Neither is there any evidence that he was pressurised to accept the £16,500 donation/loan from friends in October 1994 over "some considerable time" or at all.
Incidentally, the story about this first "dig-out" handed over on December 27th, 1993, and the £54,000 savings is not believable. It hinges on Ahern's proposition that the lawyer, who represented him in the legal proceedings related to his marriage separation, went around their mutual friends and told them Ahern was in financial distress and needed funds to pay his lawyers (including himself, Gerry Brennan) £17,000, knowing that Ahern had "savings" of £54,000 and possibly knowing also that he had arranged a bank loan of £19,200 to pay for his and his part of wife's legal expenses.
Why would he have accepted these "loans" of £22,500 if he had no need of the cash and a further £16,500 the following October, given that he had savings of £54,000 and maybe another £30,000?
Is it possible there were no savings of £54,000 or £84,000? Could it be this was an invention concocted to disguise the receipt from some other quarter of this money in 1994?
The Dáil doesn't have to make a judgment on that, simply that the story about the savings and the "dig-outs", as told by Ahern himself, is not believable.
On September 26th, 2007, he told the Dáil: "I have discovered details of over 20 bank accounts which were either in my name, my wife's name, the names of my children or the names of people with whom I was politically associated." This was clever Ahern-speak for it conveyed that he had disclosed all the accounts in his name, in the name of his wife and in the names of his political associates over a protracted period of time. However, he did not disclose the accounts of Celia Larkin, his life-partner at the time and a political associate.
Neither did he disclose the now infamous BT account in the Irish Permanent Building Society branch in Drumcondra, the one operated by his close associate Tim Collins. But then this was a building society account, not a bank account. Was he deliberately misleading the Dáil about the bank and building society accounts with which he was associated? He should tell the Dáil. Today.