Analysis:The High Court was told Bertie Ahern's reputation is "under attack", writes Colm Keena
Lawyers for the Mahon tribunal must now decide whether to continue with the scheduled taking of further evidence from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern on Thursday and Friday of next week, following his application to the High Court yesterday.
The courts will no doubt do all they can to facilitate an early hearing of Ahern's application, but there is a limit to the extent to which matters can be rushed. An early hearing, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court by the losing side, could take six months or more.
Last night there was no change to the schedule of witnesses on the tribunal's website. Ahern's solicitors told the court yesterday the Taoiseach had no wish to prevent the tribunal going ahead with its hearings while the courts dealt with the three matters he has raised.
Yesterday's hearing ended just over one hour before the deadline for an order the tribunal had recently issued to Ahern, to produce some 150 documents relating tp expert advice given by a former Bank of Ireland banker, Paddy Stronge, to Ahern's legal team.
As part of Ahern's argument to the court, his solicitor, Liam Guidera, said in an affidavit: "There is no doubt that [ Ahern's] reputation is under attack at this tribunal." He further said: "My client's reputation is under attack by counsel for the [ tribunal]."
He is being questioned at the tribunal by tribunal counsel Des O'Neill SC.
The order seeking the 150 documents is temporarily on hold. So too is the issue of whether the tribunal may raise with Ahern statements he made in the Dáil in October 2006, in the wake of the original report in The Irish Times revealing the tribunal was investigating payments received by him in the 1990s.
Ahern's legal team is arguing that Article 15.13 of the Constitution means he cannot be examined by the tribunal on utterances he made in the Dáil. During the October 2006 sittings, Ahern dealt with the £50,000 cash he says he saved, the two "dig-outs" he says he received from friends, and the money he says he received during a visit to Manchester. It was also during those debates that he said he had checked with the "tax authorities" about the tax treatment of monies received.
These are all matters that Ahern was asked about during his last appearance at the tribunal, in December, and they will form the focus of the resumed hearings scheduled for next week.
The third matter Ahern has asked the courts to rule on concerns what his counsel yesterday referred to as the "dollar hypothesis" and the "sterling hypothesis". It was clear from the material presented to the court that Ahern feels aggrieved with how these matters were first raised during a private interview with the tribunal in 2007.
The tribunal has examined two lodgements made by Ahern in October and December 1994, and noted that the October lodgement equates to the equivalent of £25,000 sterling exactly when a particular exchange rate in use on the day is applied, while the December lodgement equates to exactly $45,000.
These possibilities were never mentioned to Ahern prior to the private interview.
Also, he is being furnished with copies of all the documents linked to his accounts at AIB that are being discovered by the bank to the tribunal.
However, he was not furnished with exchange rate details from the 1990s, which must have been provided by the bank to the tribunal prior to his private interview.
In short, he seems to feel he was ambushed. The tribunal has not yet responded but it may perhaps argue there is a difference between supplying Ahern with copies of documents concerning his own accounts, and material supplied to the tribunal that is not directly linked to Ahern's accounts.
Ahern now wants the courts to direct that all the material used by the tribunal when it was constructing the two "hypotheses" be supplied to him, as well as the identity of any forensic accountants engaged by the tribunal.
He rejects the tribunal's suggestion that the lodgements might have been, respectively, sterling and dollar cash.
Senior political figures have in the past answered questions from tribunals about statements they made in the Dáil, although Michael Lowry complained about such questioning when giving evidence to the Moriarty tribunal.