Owen declines to comment on Gogarty's tribunal letter

The deputy leader of Fine Gael, Mrs Nora Owen, has declined to comment on a statement at the Flood Tribunal claiming to link her to one of the companies at the centre of the planning tribunal's inquiries.

Mrs Owen told The Irish Times she was not aware that a letter read out at the tribunal yesterday and written by Mr James Gogarty in 1996 claimed she had a long association with the Murphy group, which made a payment to Mr Ray Burke in 1989.

Mr Gogarty also accused Mrs Owen of thwarting his efforts to have complaints against the Gardai investigated during her tenure as Minister for Justice in 1996.

The letter to the then Progressive Democrats TD Mr Michael McDowell, in November 1996, was written when Mr Gogarty was seeking to have gardai investigated for declining to prosecute Mr Joe Murphy jnr for allegedly making threatening late-night telephone calls to Mr Gogarty's home.

In the letter to Mr McDowell, Mr Gogarty insisted that he had made allegations of fraud to the Garda about the Murphy group. He added: "What is worse is that the Minister, who should be affording me justice as of right, is thwarting my entitlement to have my well-founded complaints properly investigated by the courts because, I believe, she is not above suspicion herself in these matters from my knowledge of her association with the Murphy group over the years and her double standards on the political culture you have been highlighting."

Mrs Owen said the first she knew of the details of the accusation was when she was contacted by The Irish Times. She had not seen the letter or heard its contents, and it would be unfair to ask her to comment on it.

Mrs Owen was mentioned at the tribunal on February 18th but yesterday was the first time the allegation of an association with the Murphy group over the years was made in public.

On February 18th, in a discussion about the letter which wasn't then read out, Mr Gogarty appeared to be retracting his allegations, and said he wasn't making any implications against the Garda and the former minister. Pressed on whether he had accused Mrs Owen of "deliberate evasion", he answered: "Evasion could be witting or unwitting, the fact that she hadn't information. To me it appears there was evasion."

Mrs Owen was a member of Dublin County Council in 1989, the year the payment, allegedly for planning permission, was made to Mr Burke. Her constituency of Dublin North included the Murphy lands. The Assistant City and County Manager at the time was Mr George Redmond, who recently admitted taking payments from property developers.

Speaking to The Irish Times at the Fine Gael Euro-selection convention on March 7th, Mrs Owen said she had not been asked to furnish a statement by the tribunal and did not expect to be called to give evidence.

She did not know Ray Burke "personally" and in relation to allegations of corruption she said "everybody had heard the rumours", but she wouldn't act on a rumour. She recognised that in relation to the 1989 county council her name "is out there" but that was because she was "a very robust member of the council".

Asked if she had been requested to make a statement to the tribunal or if she had volunteered a statement, Mrs Owen replied: "No, no, I haven't been asked or anything. No, I mean that was just me as minister, and he was just having a go."

Mrs Owen added that Mr Gogarty hadn't liked "the answer he got, and I mean a lot of people don't like the answers they got and I can't do anything about them.

"No, I would think that at that stage he was just thrashing about at everybody. But, if you notice, he said in his evidence that if the guards had prosecuted this man none of this would have even come out. So he was blaming me for not telling the guards to go and prosecute this man."

She added that Mr Gogarty "just took a swipe at me. During the tribunal you'll note that he withdrew all his angst against the guards and against me by saying that `she mightn't have known everything.' "