Bertie Read online

  PART ONE

  2006

  Chapter 1

  SCOOP

  A newspaper reporter’s work is like that of a firefighter, in that there are periods when the reporter has to be there, just in case. During such dull periods the newspaper still has to be filled, and reporters can be assigned to write up reports about matters that are of little general interest. A way of escaping from the more tedious aspects of the job is to generate your own news, or scoops, since reporters who can do so win a little freedom from the line editors to whom they report, and with a bit of luck they can make their lives more interesting.

  On the morning of 19 September 2006 I arrived at work on what looked as if it was going to be a quiet news day. The Irish Times was still in D’Olier Street, in a terrace of old buildings that had been connected to each other over time by the knocking of holes in their walls, creating a complex whole whose full details were known only to a select few. If you were going to the canteen and strayed from your normal route you could get lost in a warren of linoleum-covered staircases and bizarrely connected hallways.

  I entered by the so-called works entrance in Fleet Street, climbed to the newsroom on the second floor and walked through it to a smaller room at the back that had once been the men’s toilets but was now the business and finance section. It looked onto the dull brick wall of the building opposite, through the broken windows of which pigeons flew in and out. There was little by way of natural light.

  At that period much of my section’s work consisted of reporting on the phenomenal and seemingly never-ending growth of the Irish economy, and on the astonishing wealth that had been accumulated by business owners and investors over the previous decade or more. Every week there was yet another startling story about a killing made through the sale of assets, or about the latest purchase made by the Irish leviathans who were busy buying the choicest properties in the Western world. There was an air of unreality about the stories which created their interest while at the same time robbing them of any depth. Unfortunately, too few of us paused to reflect on what that might mean.

  I sat at my desk with my takeaway cup of coffee, an almond croissant and a copy of that morning’s edition. My to-do list was empty. Then the phone rang.

  A short time later I had in my hands a number of documents that I read carefully so as to estimate their journalistic value. It was immediately clear that I had not only a scoop but one that concerned the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. Anything about Ahern was of journalistic interest. He had been in power for nine years and was the most popular politician in Ireland—possibly the most popular since the foundation of the state. He was at one and the same time the country’s most powerful politician, one of its biggest celebrities and someone whose place in history was secure. Everything about him was news.

  The documents concerned the workings of the Mahon Tribunal, the planning inquiry that had been set up by Ahern’s first Government soon after it had come to power in June 1997. Scoops based on leaks about tribunals had become so frequent that they were something of a debased currency. The country was suffering from tribunal-allegation fatigue. The saving grace, however, was that this leak involved Ahern.

  The information I had showed that the tribunal had written to a man called David McKenna informing him it had been told that he paid money to Ahern in or around December 1993. McKenna was a successful businessman who was friendly with Ahern and had on occasion brought him on a private jet to watch soccer matches in Manchester. The tribunal told McKenna that it was investigating a number of payments to Ahern. Furthermore, the information indicated that McKenna had replied to the tribunal saying that he had indeed paid money to Ahern. So what was at issue wasn’t another allegation of a payment: it was a confirmed payment.

  A tribunal can investigate only matters that are covered by its terms of reference, and the Mahon Tribunal was charged, in the main, with investigating allegations of corruption in planning. Allegations of corruption in different planning decisions over the years had been arranged by the tribunal into discrete sets of planned hearings, or modules, and I had to explain to my readers which module or planning decision the inquiry being made of McKenna, who ran a successful employment agency, belonged to.

  Making my way across the newsroom, I stopped at the news desk and told the news editor, Miriam Donohue, that I had some material revealing that the Mahon Tribunal was investigating payments to Bertie Ahern in 1993.

  ‘Oh, that sounds good. You’d better go up and talk to Geraldine,’ she said.

  Miriam was referring to the then editor of the Irish Times, Geraldine Kennedy. I walked across the newsroom and through a doorway that led to the editor’s office, which was in fact a number of rooms. In the first were the desks of the editor’s secretary and five or six more desks belonging to senior editors. On the right was the editor’s office, while on the left, up a step, was the conference room, where the section heads met at scheduled hours every day to discuss what was going into coming editions and the progress of the items being worked on. This room, with its wall maps and set of tables arranged in a square, was used for less frequent meetings in which the organisers of the different elements of the paper’s content would meet and apprise the editor or duty editor of their plans and progress. It also served as an important stage for all the gossip and office manoeuvring that exists in any organisation of substance and supposed power.

  On the day I went up to the editor’s office Geraldine was just finishing her weekly meeting with the political reporters who covered the goings-on in Leinster House. We sat at the conference-room table, and I told her what had happened and gave her the material I had to read through. Geraldine, a former political editor and a long-time political journalist, was immediately interested. She was cognisant of the fact that it was a controversial matter affecting the reputation of the most powerful person in the land. We discussed what I had and how I should go about preparing my report for publication. Any mistaken allegation about such a figure would be a huge embarrassment. Ahern would have to be given an opportunity to respond to anything that was going to be written. It was agreed that I would work closely with her on the story.

  By the next evening the story was ready to run. I got in contact with people who acted as spokespersons for Ahern. The Government spokesperson said it was a matter for the party spokesperson, who said it was a tribunal matter and therefore confidential. I contacted McKenna and, on his instructions, his solicitor. The story was ready to roll. I sat at my computer in the messy business section and wrote the few paragraphs that were going to appear on the next day’s front page. Geraldine came up and looked at it on the screen and suggested a few changes.

  It is important to say that the report the Irish Times was about to publish was, we believed, more than just another tribunal leak of something that would in time have come to the attention of the public. The information we had belonged to what is called the private phase of the tribunal’s inquiries, and it concerned a matter that, depending on how it panned out, might never come to be mentioned in the course of one of the tribunal’s public hearings. The tribunal, naturally, investigated much more than it disclosed publicly, largely because a great deal of what it investigated turned out to be untrue or to be unconnected with the terms of reference that laid down its powers and duties. We were reporting something that might otherwise never be disclosed—the best sort of scoop. The payments might be of no interest to the tribunal in the context of its terms of reference, but they were of legitimate public interest.

  The report was published on the front page on 21 September 2006, with the headline ‘Tribunal examines payments to Taoiseach.’ The first few paragraphs read:

  A wealthy businessman David McKenna has been contacted by the Mahon Tribunal about payments to the Taoiseach, B
ertie Ahern.

  The tribunal is investigating a number of payments to Mr Ahern in and around December 1993, including cash payments, The Irish Times has learned.

  Mr McKenna is one of three or four persons contacted by the tribunal concerning payments to Mr Ahern totalling between €50,000 and €100,000. The tribunal has been told that the money was used to pay legal bills incurred by Mr Ahern around this time. In a letter to Mr McKenna in June of this year and seen by The Irish Times, he was told the ‘tribunal has been informed that you made payment of money to Mr Bertie Ahern TD, or for his benefit, in or about December 1993. The tribunal seeks your assistance in reconciling certain receipts of funds by Mr Ahern during this period.’

  The tribunal requested a detailed statement from Mr McKenna. He was asked to name the person who requested the payment and his understanding as to why it was required. He was also asked who the payment was given to, and whether it was in cash or another form.

  It is understood a solicitor who was an associate and personal friend of Mr Ahern’s, the late Gerry Brennan, may have played a role in the matters being inquired into. Mr Brennan, a former director of Telecom Éireann, died in 1997.

  Mr McKenna, a friend of Mr Ahern’s and a known supporter of both him and his party, was estimated to be worth more than €60 million a number of years ago. However his publicly quoted recruitment firm, Marlborough Recruitment, collapsed in 2002.

  Mr McKenna is also a friend and business associate of Des Richardson, the businessman appointed by Mr Ahern in 1993 as full-time fund-raiser for Fianna Fáil and who also fundraises for Mr Ahern’s constituency operation. The tribunal was told in private that Mr McKenna was one of the people who made a payment to Mr Ahern.

  The report was printed across the top of the front page. What happened next is well captured in the diary kept by the then deputy political editor of the Irish Independent, Senan Molony. The diary is also useful in providing a flavour of the political coverage of the time. I am grateful for his permission to use these excerpts.

  Chapter 2

  A POLITICAL REPORTER’S DIARY

  September 2006

  September is when the TDs pretend to be back, but aren’t really. The Fianna Fáilers went to some hotel in Mayo for their annual think-in. A Deputy balanced a jug of water on his head in the bar at 4 a.m.

  Bertie was interviewed by ‘Morning Ireland’ at breakfast in the hotel. He had a cut at Enda Kenny [Fine Gael leader], noting the local fellow was ‘around a long time’, having entered the Dáil in 1975, two years before himself. So much for Enda’s portraying himself as the poster-child of national vigour.

  But the remark only allowed the Taoiseach to be asked if he was nearing the end of his own shelf life. He responded with a classic Bertieism—that he knew his own ‘shelf-by date’. In America a year ago, when Bertie spoke on the issue of the illegal Irish, he said that if support dried up in Congress we would have to ‘fight our own canoe’.

  In the afternoon Brian Cowen [Minister for Finance] promised that FF would have the ‘bottle for the battle’ when the election came around.

  7 September

  Mary Harney resigns after no fewer than thirteen years at the helm of the Progressive Democrats (PDs). She will be remembered for banning smoky coal in Dublin and for not being Charlie Haughey. She also blocked the Bertie Bowl [the proposed football stadium for west Dublin]. Her popularity has been dropping like a stone since she became Minister for Health.

  ‘Why, I am not worthy,’ says Michael McDowell [Minister for Justice and Harney’s successor as head of the PDs].

  12 September

  Fine Gael hold their parliamentary party gathering in Sligo, and claim they will be able to pick up an extra 26 seats next time out. That’s twenty-six. It sounds preposterous.

  Pat Rabbitte [Labour Party leader] shows up to signal that Labour is willing. Later on, in the early hours, he leaves the north-west to return home. As it happens, his car is almost out of fuel—but there are no petrol stations between Sligo and Dublin open for custom in the early hours.

  Pat drives on empty until the motor is spluttering. All the way through Leitrim he has fears of being stranded, having to sleep in his car. Eventually he passes a single old pump, relic of the 1950s, in the village of Newtownforbes.

  He is reduced to banging on a Longford garage door at 1:30 a.m, miraculously raising a grizzled head from an upstairs window. ‘Is it yourself?’ asks the vest-clad rustic. ‘It is,’ replies Pat. The pump is opened, manages to dispense modern unleaded, and Pat makes it back to Dublin.

  Five days later Mayo are crushed in the All-Ireland Final.

  20 September

  There’s a court case today in which a lorry driver who consumed half a bottle of vodka (and some beer) before attempting to collect a skip ‘made shit’ of Michael McDowell’s driveway.

  That’s what an angry Minister said to the driver, before noticing the latter was under the weather and calling the cops. McDowell was ‘ranting and raving’, the accused man managed to reveal in court before being fined and banned.

  It was the week McDowell, new PD leader, announced it was party policy to send all trucks out of Dublin to a new port half way to Dundalk.

  21 September

  Yikes! A landmine this morning in the Irish Times. It reveals that the Mahon Tribunal is investigating payments to the Taoiseach.

  The money is said to have come from businessman David McKenna in 1993 when Mr Ahern was Minister for Finance. Bertie, on a constituency visit to Clare, admits the reports are accurate, the source ‘impeccable’, and that whoever leaked it must have seen ‘the full file’. But he also says the amounts quoted are ‘off the wall’ at €50,000–100,000.

  The Taoiseach later suggests at a doorstep interview that some shadowy people have been out to discredit him over the last few days. The Irish Times says the money is connected to legal bills Mr Ahern had in 1993.

  David McKenna is a millionaire who made his money out of Marlborough Recruitment, a firm that unfortunately went bankrupt. This is a peculiar story, and initially everyone seems to be adopting a wait-and-see attitude. There are some suggestions the money may be as little as £10,000 but whether the Minister for Finance should be taking even a few bob from businessmen, personal friends or not, is another question.

  Bertie is furious. At a further impromptu press conference he denounces the leak as scurrilous, and says the money is a fraction of the amounts usually thrown around in tribunal stories. He says he’s not going to answer questions about his ‘Holy Communion and Confirmation money, or what I got for my birthday.’ (He was 55 on 12 September.)

  Mr Ahern, who in recent years flew to Manchester United matches with Mr McKenna in the latter’s private jet, won’t say the exact amount involved, or what it was used for. He mentions his separation. Meanwhile it is emerging that more people than McKenna may be involved.

  The story is developing, and is already damaging.

  Fine Gael quotes the Taoiseach in the Dáil from September 1997, speaking about the McCracken tribunal.

  ‘The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone.’

  Two days beforehand there was a BBC ‘Panorama’ broadcast about Premiership managers and claimed corruption. Now, with a week to go to the new Dáil session, Bertie is mixed up with alleged ‘bungs’.

  22 September

  Swirling rumours in Leinster House and Government Buildings. The suggestions are that the total sum Bertie received was either £10,000 or £20,000, with four donors giving equal amounts. The pressure is on for the full list of names and amounts, so the public can judge the individuals and their possible links to Government.

  Bertie makes a defensive prepared statement after a report launch in Government Buildings. He complains twice of the ‘sinister’ nature of the leak, and refuses to take questions, walking out past journalists who sit there in stony silence.

&n
bsp; Yesterday the Taoiseach complained of reports (in Village magazine) that appeared to link him to bank accounts in Liechtenstein, Jersey and the Dutch Antilles. Except Bertie called them the ‘Dutch Anthills’. Trust the media to make a mountain out of an anthill.

  Did he or didn’t he pay tax on these payments? If they were loans, to get him out of a tight spot, no tax would be payable. Bertie didn’t say they were loans, but instead that he ‘dealt with them properly’. As Minister for Finance at the time, of course, he was responsible for clawing in the nation’s tax, as well as being responsible for the tax authorities themselves, while also capable of re-writing tax law all by himself.

  It is still all to play for in what the Irish Daily Mail is calling Bertie’s biggest political crisis. His body language this morning was tight, testy and all bad. The latest rumour is that Miriam Ahern is due to give evidence to the Mahon Tribunal in October, which scarcely seems credible. Another is that the money raised was not for legal fees but intended as a ‘golden handbag’ in the marriage break-up.

  The sooner the full truth is out the better. Everyone is waiting for the Sunday papers in 48 hours, but Ursula Halligan of TV3—which last night had lurid footage of tens and twenties in Euro banknotes filling the screen—dares to mention the phrase ‘early general election’.

  23 September

  The Irish Times reports that the monies were loans, and were accepted on the basis that they would be repaid. It’s suggested that at least some of the benefactors then wouldn’t take the money back. Thirteen years on, some amounts remain outstanding. Does this make them gifts?

  Couldn’t Bertie, who signed blank cheques for Charlie after all, have sent his friends similar slips in the post if they were too shy to accept them in person? And what’s with the shyness, anyway—what is Irish business coming to, if people won’t allow their backs to be scratched in turn after they have seen to Bertie’s seven-year itch?