There will be little sympathy for former minister, Mr Ray Burke, as he faces a bill of an estimated €10 million for legal representation before the Flood and Mahon Tribunal.
Judge Alan Mahon rejected Mr Burke's application for the State to pay his costs yesterday. The ruling is based on the finding that Mr Burke failed to co-operate with the tribunal - and not on the findings of corruption that had been made against him in the tribunal's interim report.
Mr Burke's fees are based on the work of a firm of solicitors, senior and junior counsel, and accountants and tax advisers. Their activity was necessitated by the serious accusations levelled against Mr Burke, some of which were raised in advance of his appointment as minister for foreign affairs in the last government. The Taoiseach said that he "climbed up every tree in North Dublin" checking out the allegations at the time. And he also asked Mr Dermot Ahern to establish their veracity.
Mr Burke denied all accusations of receiving any kind of improper payments. He told the Dáil that he had no overseas bank account, when he had five. He also said that a £30,000 donation from Mr James Gogarty was the largest single donation he had received. Had he told the Taoiseach and the Dáil the full truth, as he was bound to do as a TD, much of the need for the Planning Tribunal would have been avoided.
When the tribunal was set up, Mr Burke continued to avoid telling the truth. In the words of Judge Mahon, he refused to co-operate with it, in order to "mislead the Tribunal to a very significant degree and to frustrate its attempts to seek out the truth". He failed to tell the tribunal of £125,000 he received in payments from builders Brennan and McGowan, or of the £1,000 a month he was paid by them between 1975 and 1982, at a time when this was five times his salary as a TD. It took the tribunal many months of painstaking work to prove his denials wrong. This is the reason for the costs finding against him.
There are lessons to be learned for others involved in tribunals. Judge Mahon stated that had Mr Burke co-operated with and given truthful evidence to the tribunal, he would have been favourably disposed to awarding him a portion of his costs "even in the face of very serious substantive findings of corruption".
That is a very fair judgment in the circumstances. It is to be hoped that it will have a salutary effect on those appearing before tribunals. The workings of most of the recently established tribunals have been prolonged through lack of co-operation bordering on obstruction. It is important that, at the end of the day, such issues are borne in mind.
The roles of long-running tribunals of inquiry have been the subject of much controversy in recent months. Their deliberations have been tedious, costly to the taxpayer and slow. In the case of Flood and Mahon, however, the public will feel that Mr Ray Burke got his come-uppance. A fair and good finding was made.