DUBLIN, 7 March 2004 — It sounds like something from the worst kind of banana republic. A rich businessman is invited into the Parliament of a small, cash-strapped island nation to meet the prime minister and his most senior lieutenants. He wants to build the biggest shopping center in the continent.
The ministers say it’s a great idea. Then, in the corridor, he is asked for a five million pounds sterling sweetener, to be deposited in an offshore bank account whose number is handed to him on a scrap of paper. When, in shock, he refuses, declaring “You make the mafia look like monks”, the businessman is told: “You could end up in the (River) Liffey for that statement.”
This sensational testimony from the developer Tom Gilmartin — in which he implicates almost half the Fianna Fail Cabinet of the late 1980s, including the current taioseach, Bertie Ahern — brought Ireland’s sleaze tribunals to a new low this week.
Tales of politicians’ grotesque greed and businessmen’s palm-greasing are nothing new in Irish politics. Six years of relentless corruption hearings have revealed it to be one of the most sleaze-ridden countries in Europe. Charles Haughey, the disgraced former taioseach and Ahern’s mentor, took up to 8.5 million pounds sterling from businessmen in the 1980s. While vast numbers of young people were forced to emigrate because of his economic austerity measures, Haughey lived in a Georgian mansion with its own private pub amid 280 acres. He once spent 16,000 pounds sterling in one year on monogrammed French shirts and would retire at weekends with his entourage to his own private island off Kerry.
But Ahern, known as the “Teflon taioseach”, has avoided the mud which has stuck to many of his allies in Fianna Fail. Although he signed blank chcks for Haughey, and was rarely away from his side, Ahern appears not to have seen or heard any evil. But now, with Gilmartin’s testimony, he has been put at the scene of one of the most outrageous alleged incidents of sleaze. Soon, when he is called in front of Judge Alan Mahon’s planning corruption tribunal, he will have to answer questions about what he knew of his ministers’ habits and a missing 50,000 pounds sterling check which Gilmartin said he gave to the former environment minister and European commissioner, Padraig Flynn — with, he claims, Ahern’s knowledge.
Gilmartin is a 68-year-old builder who made his fortune in property in England before returning to Ireland in the 1980s. He planned to build the biggest shopping center in Europe at Quarryvale, north Dublin, and transform a semiderelict stretch of Dublin quayside into a glamorous shopping district. But he says he grew frustrated at the level of palm-greasing required by Fianna Fail.
So inured are the Irish public to political corruption that few expect Fianna Fail to implode. In fact, many people secretly admire the culture of the “cute hoor”, the politician who can bend the rules to suit himself or his constituents.
