Answers to allegations should not have to wait until report

There is an allegation by a Mr Tom Gilmartin now in the public domain that Fianna Fail sought a massive bribe in return for its support on a planning permission application in Co Dublin. There is a related allegation that a former Fianna Fail minister, Padraig Flynn, received £50,000 in connection with this planning application.

The allegations may all be entirely false for all I know. Indeed the allegation concerning Padraig Flynn seems hugely implausible, for whatever infelicities there may be about Pee Flynn's style, he is not corrupt. But the allegations have been made and there is legitimate public interest in knowing whether there is any truth to them or not.

Yes, there is a tribunal (the Flood tribunal) inquiring into such matters and, no doubt in the fullness of time, that tribunal will get around to examining this and the myriad of other allegations that have come to its attention.

Eventually, one presumes, there will be a report and all will be made known, but in the meantime it is not enough for us to be told to bide our time. We are entitled to know now whether the main political party in the land and the main party in government received the payment.

It isn't good enough therefore for Bertie Ahern to be shrugging off questions about these most recent allegations by saying that all these matters will be examined by the Flood tribunal. It would be hugely ironic if the establishment of a tribunal to make secret matters public should itself be the reason to keep matters secret that would otherwise become public.

The very act of shrugging off such questions itself raises doubts about Fianna Fail's standards. The suspicion is that if Fianna Fail discloses what it knows about the Tom Gilmartin allegations, more questions will arise which could prove hugely embarrassing and could embroil people not previously fingered in connection with financial impropriety.

Alternatively, it could emerge that senior people in Fianna Fail knew a long time ago about impropriety but did nothing and said nothing about it.

It was this latter suspicion which hangs over Bertie Ahern's handling of the Ray Burke affair. This was that it is entirely implausible that the general secretary of Fianna Fail, the former Fianna Fail director of finance and the former Fianna Fail head fund-raiser all knew that Ray Burke had received a total of at least £60,000 in June 1989 (and not just the £30,000 that was known about) and never told their party leader.

All these people knew in September 1997 that Ray Burke was lying to the Dail and never said a word to Bertie Ahern about it, and Bertie knew not a thing about it.

Padraig Flynn has done himself less than justice in his own responses to these allegations. Why has he not chosen to answer questions openly and directly on radio or television about these allegations? There can hardly be any question of him being reappointed to the EU Commission unless he addresses these matters.

It isn't just Fianna Fail, of course, that has questions to answer. The second-largest party in the Dail, Fine Gael, has quite a bit of explaining to do as well. This concerns its finances.

Just when Fine Gael came unexpectedly to power in December 1994, it was on the verge of bankruptcy. There was talk of having to sell off the fine Georgian headquarters in Mount Street. There had been frenzied attempts by John Bru ton and his predecessor as leader, Alan Dukes, to wring serious money from "high net worth individuals" (HNWI).

I understand that on the very night that he became Taoiseach, John Bruton presided at the formal first meeting of his new government at Aras an Uachtarain and then hotfooted it to dine with a HNWI. The meeting with that HNWI had been organised in the midst of the Fine Gael frenzy over cash.

That frenzy soon abated. In the year after it took office in December 1994, Fine Gael had a spectacular success in money-raising. The debt was quickly cleared off. Suddenly HNWIs, who had no interest previously in supporting the democratic process by giving money to Fine Gael, suddenly saw the merits of Fine Gael as an agent of Irish democratic values.

Should we not be in a position to evaluate what it was about Fine Gael in government that seemed so attractive to the HNWIs and how it was that Fine Gael did not seem at all attractive to the HNWIs when it was out of power and seemed to have no prospect of power?

We should know whether Fine Gael is even a little bit corrupt, for if it is, then, truly, there is no difference at all between the parties. That is, of course, unless it transpires that Fianna Fail is corrupt through and through.

By the way, I bet the HNWIs are fairly pleased by the current lot. Apart from the generous reductions in the higher rate of income tax, there was that massive halving of capital gains tax at one stroke from 40 per cent to 20 per cent. And, incidentally, hardly a cheep of protest from the opposition.

Knowing how corrupt our present political system was would be satisfying, but it would hardly change the obvious prescription for this: the removal of all private finance from the political arena.

Until that happens, there will be corruption and there will be unfairness - unfairness because those parties which appeal to the interests of the HNWIs will be funded generously - while those which appeal to the middle and lower income groups will be funded sparsely or not at all.

This means, of course, that the political parties and campaigns would be funded exclusively from the public purse. It would cost a few extra million (maybe £15 million a year, including provision for political campaigns). Policing the border between private and public funding would also cost a bit, the cost of a permanent commission to examine in detail all expenditures by parties and candidates, perhaps another £5 million a year.

But that would be a small price to pay for honesty in our public life and fairness in our political system. In the meantime, the questions that arise from Tom Gilmartin's allegations have to be addressed. Bertie Ahern seems immune from media pressure on this, but perhaps a little political muscle could be exerted.

Remember the Progressive Democrats? Well, they are still in being and happen to be in government with Bertie. If they insisted on some answers sharp and quick, we might get them.