Taoiseach 'still the great evader'

Fine Gael: Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was "still the great evader", and his statement still "does not address the fundamental issue at stake", Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said as Mr Ahern finished his personal comments to the Dáil.

There was "one fundamental fact" about the Taoiseach accepting €61,000, he said. "It was wrong. There's no need for ethics, no need for legislation, no need for guidelines. When you put your hand on that money in your capacity as minister for finance, private or public, you did wrong."

He asked Mr Ahern: "Are you man enough to say that what you did in accepting this money was wrong?"

He told the Dáil that Mr Ahern had stated on RTÉ that he had refused to have a function held for him because it was personal money and the function was political.

"But you saw nothing wrong in personally accepting €12,000 raised by friends in Manchester."

He asked: "Why by your own standards was it wrong in Dublin but right in Manchester? You're the accountant. You know the tax laws. Was it because a personal donation in Dublin would be taxable, but in Manchester it was not?"

"You were wrong to conceal it for the last 13 years, wrong to condemn it hypocritically in this House when you knew you had accepted it, and wrong to declare you had done nothing wrong - and today you say it's an error, a misjudgment, honest or otherwise."

As minister for finance, Mr Ahern accepted cash to the value of €61,000 from businessmen, friends and associates. "We know that cash was accepted after three separate collections. We know too that the Taoiseach claims to have €63,000 in personal savings at a time when he had no bank account."

The Fine Gael leader said: "We thought that the culture of old Fianna Fáil of Haughey and Burke and others was long since gone, but it seems to be now accepted again by Ministers Cullen, Martin, Cowen, O'Dea, Roche, Hanafin, Coughlan, Ó Cuív and Lenihan. All have come out and said that the Taoiseach did no wrong."

Quoting former minister Ray Burke in 1997, Mr Kenny asked "does this sound familiar? 'I have done nothing illegal, unethical or improper'. They were the "same words, same standards, different application," said Mr Kenny. Apparently "new Fianna Fáil resurrects the same old standards in the same old way".

'Loans from friends . . . gifts from strangers'

Labour: The heart of the matter was whether the Taoiseach had done wrong, Labour leader Pat Rabbitte told the Dáil.

"Is it remotely credible that monies outstanding for 13 years, without any repayment of any kind having been repaid, you can suddenly now categorise these as loans? You do not need to be as bright as Junior Minister Lenihan to know that these transactions, if they happened, were gifts and, therefore, have tax implications.

"On the Manchester monies, can we do more than highlight the absolute impropriety of a serving minister for finance accepting payment for a nixer outside the State? Never mind the no law was broken defence. By any standards, it was wrong."

Mr Rabbitte said that not one minister could bring himself or herself to say that what happened at Manchester was wrong.

"If you believe that businessmen happen along to a posh hotel in Manchester to hear any old Joe Soap lecture on the Irish economy and then have an impromptu whip-round to give him something for himself.

"In normal life you get gifts from your friends and you take loans from strangers. Yet Mr Ahern says he got loans from friends and took gifts from strangers."

Mr Rabbitte suggested that "Minister of State Lenihan's derision of the Opposition is because we did not adequately probe the discreet veil that was drawn across the other £50,000 which Mr Ahern enigmatically tells us he put back into his account . . . back into his account from where, is the question that must be answered.

"Where was the 50,000 resting, since Mr Ahern did not have a bank account. In a sock in the hot press?"

Mr Rabbitte said he accepted the Taoiseach's assertion that the £50,000 were savings. "But he enjoyed a TD's salary, a minister's salary, and the use of a premises bought for him by friends of Fianna Fáil. How can he be portrayed, in those circumstances, as living in straitened conditions?

"Why, if there were £50,000 in savings, was it necessary to raise a bank loan? And if there was a bank loan in place, why was it necessary to have a whip-round to replace the bank loan?" Mr Rabbitte asked the Taoiseach if he had evaded tax, and if he had a bank account outside the jurisdiction.

He added that the Tánaiste, on Thursday, could scarce to forbear to watch the Opposition squander their accountability time. "The Tánaiste had better grow accustomed to sitting there in silence, because after this debacle for the PDs the only question you will be permitted to ask in Cabinet is 'Bhfuil cead agam dul amach?'"

Michael O'Regan

'Do the decent thing and resign'

Green Party: No member of Cabinet had said that the Taoiseach's acceptance of payments was correct, according to Green Party leader Trevor Sargent.

He said to the Taoiseach that "not one of your Ministers has said 'what the Taoiseach did was right'. Your deputy leader said that you were 'not incorrect'. That is clearly the formulation of a lawyer and as a defence is both weak and irrelevant to this debate."

Mr Sargent said the Taoiseach had three options to show leadership.

"Take positive action to clean up Irish politics; do the decent thing and resign; or give the electorate the choice between your politics and mine."

Hitting out at the Progressive Democrats, he said the Taoiseach was not the only one to be ethically compromised. "The PDs have shown themselves to be more interested in clinging to power than in standards in public office."

The Dublin North TD said to the Taoiseach that "by your own standards, which you set out in 1997 and which you have applied to other office-holders, you would be gone. If I were in your position, Taoiseach, I would have had no option but to resign."

He said that "you could go to the people, giving them the choice of whose ethics and political culture they want running this country".

Mr Sargent asked whether the Taoiseach would "take steps to redress the damage that has been done to public confidence in the political system? Will you introduce legislation to ban corporate donations to political parties and to limit personal donations to nominal sums? Will you cut the financial ties between vested interests and policymakers forever?"

The Green Party leader said the debate was "about the fact that you took gifts from businesses and businessmen; the fact that, only 10 days ago, you misrepresented the established facts on Clare FM and have attempted to avoid answering legitimate questions on the matter ever since; the fact that, as minister for finance, you secured payments for personal benefit; and the fact that you have transgressed ethical standards that a minister or head of government would have to follow in Scandinavia, Germany, the UK or the USA, for example."

He added: "Shame on you, Taoiseach, for being beholden to vested interests." He added: "Shame on you, Taoiseach, for undermining the people's trust. Shame on you for bringing the office of Taoiseach into disrepute."

Marie O'Halloran

'Blank-cheque culture' of FF leadership

Sinn Féin: Sinn Féin's Dáil leader Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin demanded that the Government resign and the Taoiseach call a general election. "The Taoiseach was clearly wrong to accept the personal donation at the Manchester event when he was minister for finance. Most people believe that he was not personally corrupt, unlike many within his party at the time.

"However, only the most naive believe that he was not aware of what went on in the brown envelope and blank-cheque culture of the Fianna Fáil leadership and among many of its elected members.

"Of course, it was not confined to Fianna Fáil. Fine Gael, as shown by the tribunals, has shown that it, too, share a similar culture."

Mr Ó Caoláin said there was no suggestion that members of the current FF-PD Cabinet had personally benefited from bribes or backhanders during their term of office. But there was an old saying about the British journalist which could be adapted to the Government.

It read: "You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist. But seeing what the man will do, unbribed, there's no occasion to."

Mr Ó Caoláin said that during the Government's term of office, property speculators and developers had benefited directly as never before from Government decisions.

"The Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway races has become a symbol of power, greed and elitism in Ireland the way Dublin Castle and the Kildare Street Club once were. The gulf of inequality in our society has widened, something that the new Tánaiste, the self-styled moral guardian of the Government, thinks it is a good thing.

"If it was wrong for the then minister for finance to accept money gifts from wealthy business people in 1994, is it not even more wrong for a Taoiseach and a Government, for the past decade, to surrender the housing policy of the State to speculators and unscrupulous developers who are fleecing families with the ever spiralling cost of houses?"

Mr Ó Caoláin said those were the same developers who successfully lobbied the Government to amend part four of the Planning and Development Act so that they would not have to meet their legal obligation to provide 20 per cent of social and affordable housing in all developments.

"This Government has brought in a form of legalised bribery, because it has allowed the developers to pay off the local authorities. What other lobby group could have turned around a key piece of legislation in the same way?"

Michael O'Regan

'Taoiseach should go today'

Technical Group: Tánaiste Michael McDowell is "propping up an unreconstructed Fianna Fáil party, still defending sleaze after 10 years of investigation", Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins told the Dáil as he renewed his call for the Taoiseach to resign.

Mr Higgins, who was also speaking for a number of Independent TDs, said it was "nauseating to see Fianna Fáil and the PDs reduce this whole controversy, this nexus of patronage and sleaze, to a cynical game of Scrabble, of bending and twisting words so that both parties can walk out claiming to be vindicated".

He said Mr Ahern had believed "taking large amounts of money from business was an error and misjudgment, not because it was wrong; not because there was a massive conflict of interest; but because it came out into the open and caused grief and consternation to the Taoiseach and his friends. And the Tánaiste applauds that particular statement."

Deriding Mr McDowell, he asked "was it for this that the Tánaiste flew to the tops of the lamp-posts all over Dublin to tell us we needed him in Government to straighten out the Fianna Fáil chancers? Well, that event has now been exposed for the hollow stunt that it was. He wouldn't dare repeat it at the next election ... And the lamp-posts will be left to the poodles of Ranelagh to do at the base what the Tánaiste is doing today to the alleged standards he defended when he climbed up on his ladders."

He said "the Taoiseach should go today not just for his grubby taking of funds from business interests but also because of his being beholden to business generally; [ he] has created a society that rewards the powerful at enormous cost to ordinary people".

Hitting out at the Cabinet, he said that "Fianna Fáil ministers defend not only the major conflict of interest by the Taoiseach in accepting the €61,000 from wealthy individuals, they also defend the sleaze, cronyism, patronage and the corruption that pervaded Irish politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Everyone caught in the middle of that came up with the same catchcry, that 'we did no favours and we did nothing wrong'."

Marie O'Halloran