Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin has said evidence given in the Mahon tribunal by developer Tom Gilmartin is "malicious and ill-founded" and an "outrageous lie".
Mr Martin issued a personal statement today after Mr Gilmartin claimed in the witness box at the tribunal in Dublin Castle that Cork-based developer Owen O'Callaghan claimed to have given Mr Martin "a six-figure sum" because he was being groomed to be taoiseach.
"I wish to articulate my deep shock and outrage at evidence given by Mr Tom Gilmartin this morning at a public sitting of the tribunal. I am amazed that such allegations relating to me are now being made for the first time some 12 to 13 years at least after the alleged matters were supposed to have occurred," Mr Martin said.
"It represents a total travesty of my constitutional and legal rights to fair procedures to have allowed such malicious and ill founded allegations to be made in circumstances which must have been calculated by the witness to do injury and damage to my reputation."
Mr Martin said he had volunteered a statement to the tribunal as long ago as November 11th, 2004 in response to a request from it.
"At no stage either before nor since has the Tribunal ever indicated to me that such an allegation as that made this morning was being advanced," he added.
"For the record I now wish to state in the most categorical terms that Mr Gilmartin's allegations are an outrageous lie.
"My legal team have communicated my outrage to the tribunal and have put it on notice that an application will be made to the tribunal by counsel on my behalf at the first available opportunity so that these matters may be placed on the public record."
Mr Gilmartin also said today that Mr O'Callaghan bragged that he gave Bertie Ahern two payments totalling £80,000 in 1989 and 1993. Mr Ahern has also categorically denied he received any such payments and his counsel has accused the tribunal of allowing itself to become a platform for the airing of "preposterous allegations" against him.
The Taoiseach's counsel Conor Maguire last week told the tribunal that allegations being made against him by Mr Gilmartin were "part of a pattern of malicious and false allegations" made over the past seven years.
Mr Gilmartin also today claimed Mr O'Callaghan told him he gave then taoiseach Albert Reynolds £150,000 in relation to a development in March 1994. Counsel for the tribunal pointed out that Mr Reynolds had vehemently denied the allegation to the tribunal, describing it as "spurious, unfounded, defamatory and untrue".
The tribunal is hearing evidence in the second so-called Quarryvale II module, which is examining a property deal in which Mr Gilmartin was involved in the late 1980s and early 1990s in west Dublin. Quarryvale later became Liffey Valley shopping centre.
The site beside Dublin's M50 motorway was controversially rezoned by Dublin councillors as a town centre site, even though a site in Neilstown had been earmarked for such development.