Fianna Fail faces the hazards of scaling the high moral ground

One of the worst hazards faced by mountain climbers is the thin air at high altitudes. The higher you climb, the more likely it is that you will begin to feel the effects of oxygen deprivation. Your mind wanders. You lose concentration. You are in imminent danger of wandering off the edge and plunging into the abyss. While those experienced at high altitudes can get used to these effects, for the first-timer they are especially crippling.

The problems of scaling the high moral ground are similar. Some Irish parties are so used to it that they have learned to cope with the thin air up there. But Fianna Fail is still a novice. For the first time in its history, with this week's publication of the report of its Standards in Public Life committee, the party voluntarily placed damaging information about the activities of some of its own members in the public domain.

After 60 hours of interviews, a lot of hard work and some quality time with its legal advisers, the party committee conquered, if not quite the summits, then at least the foothills of the high moral ground. Though it raises as many questions as it answers, the report is a serious piece of work and a stark contrast to previous party investigations, like Dermot Ahern's famous expedition up every tree in North Dublin in search of the truth about Ray Burke.

Yet, so novel was the experience of getting even guarded praise for openness and honesty, the party immediately suffered a fit of the head-staggers. In the 24 hours that followed the publication of the report, Fianna Fail had scurried back down from the dizzy heights of self-criticism. Much of the good work of the committee was undone by a return to obfuscation and evasion.

The overall effect for the party was the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, it said, things are very bad. On the other, we're not going to do anything much about them. The Taoiseach spelled it out on Thursday: no action will be taken against any party member, no contradictions will be clarified and corporate political donations will not be banned. Liam Lawlor's voluntary resignation from the party, it seems, absolves it of the need to do anything but make broad recommendations for legal reform and await the outcome, at some indeterminate future date, of the Flood tribunal.

Since two of the largest known beneficiaries of the generosity of developers, Ray Burke and Colm McGrath, one retired and the other now an Independent councillor, declined to attend the committee's hearings, it was inevitable that its main focus would be Liam Lawlor. To its great credit, the committee, within the constraints of the careful legal language it felt obliged to use, asked Mr Lawlor all the hard questions. In doing so, it both confirmed much of what has been alleged elsewhere and highlighted the evasiveness of the Dublin West TD.

In a press statement released on May 17th, just after he gave evidence to the committee, Liam Lawlor told the nation how much he welcomed the opportunity to appear before it and held up the inquiry as a model for other parties: "I hope the other parties can live up to the high standards expected in this regard. It might be productive if other parties undertook the same detailed scrutinising of the actions of their elected members . . ."

We now know that this enthusiasm for the "detailed scrutinising" of politicians by their parties was far from evident in his treatment of the Fianna Fail committee. In meetings with Rory O'Hanlon and party general secretary Martin Mackin in late 1998 Liam Lawlor failed to disclose his receipt of large payments from Frank Dunlop. After he was interviewed on May 17th, the committee wrote to him accusing him of a "lack of co-operation" arising from "the inadequacy and contradictory nature of the answers that you have furnished".

If the committee was understandably unable to give a full account of precisely what money Lawlor got from whom, two things were absolutely clear from its report. Lawlor got close to £40,000 in "consultancy fees" from Frank Dunlop in 1994/5 (in addition to numerous previous substantial payments). And his claim that this money was received on "a normal commercial basis" for consultancy work is based, at best, on shifting foundations.

The single most important aspect of the report, indeed, is what it reveals about what might be called the consultancy defence. It seems clear that, in order to maintain his insistence that he never took "one penny . . . to influence my vote", Liam Lawlor will rely on the claim that the large sums he did receive were entirely as a result of his work as a consultant.

But the report raises fundamental questions about that defence by showing how slippery the explanations seem to be. Whereas, for example, Lawlor told the committee in his oral evidence that a Prague-based company of which he was a director had invoiced Dunlop for services rendered, he then wrote to the committee saying that the same company had no dealings with Dunlop at all.

It seems likely that if Lawlor had not chosen to go in the light of the report, he might have been pushed. O'Hanlon's irate letter to him on May 26th threatening a "severe sanction" certainly hints at decisive action. It might, indeed, have been better for the party if Lawlor had not decided to jump. A sharp dose of severity might have done Fianna Fail's image no harm at all.

Yet, extraordinarily, once Lawlor decided to go, the glare of scrutiny immediately gave way to a soft-focus image. Bertie Ahern issued a statement praising him for taking a "difficult decision" and acknowledging the "dedicated work he had done as a Fianna Fail public representative over the past 23 years". Brian Cowen, on the RTE Six-One News, couldn't manage a word of criticism of the man he repeatedly referred to as Liam. Dick Roche, a member of the committee, reverted on radio to the standard line that Fianna Fail politicians received large donations from developers merely because the party was in some vague way "pro-development".

It would, of course, be foolish to imagine that this reluctance to offend Lawlor had anything to do with a fear that the departing TD might be inclined to respond in kind. In his evidence to the committee, he gave some indication of the kinds of things he had seen and heard during his years of dedicated public service. His allegation that he had been offered £100,000 to assist with a planning for a casino in the Phoenix Park forced a denial on Thursday from one of Ahern's trusted associates, Des Richardson.

Another allegation that Lawlor made has attracted much less attention but is no less extraordinary. He told the committee that he "recalled an occasion when a third party speculated in his presence that the best way to receive tax designation for a development was to provide a pension fund for a named politician." Given that tax designation is widely believed the area with the potential to do most damage to the current Government, this was a worrying recollection. While the vast majority of the party's senior membership will have nothing to fear from such hearsay allegations, they provided a timely reminder that Lawlor might now feel free to say more of what he has heard.

That the committee published its correspondence with Lawlor in spite of the potential fallout suggests a genuine willingness to come to grips with the reality that is being revealed at the Flood tribunal. That desire, however, was thwarted by a continuing reluctance to acknowledge the scale of what is unfolding. The party committee provided the separate pieces of a jigsaw. It did not put those pieces together to reveal the big picture: a systematic and largely successful attempt to buy the development of the capital city on behalf of a small number of wealthy developers.

Lawlor, after all, was not the only Fianna Fail Dublin county councillor receiving large sums of money. We already knew that Colm McGrath got £30,000. Sean Gilbride seems to have been virtually on the payroll of the Quarryvale developer Owen O'Callaghan in the crucial year of 1992, receiving £13,500 over a nine-month period.

G.V. Wright got £15,000 from Frank Dunlop and O'Callaghan between 1991 and 1993, £10,000 of it in cash. Smaller sums were sprinkled liberally among a wider group of councillors. One councillor, Padraig Lynch, told the committee there was "a group with an inside track" within the Fianna Fail group on the council and that there was "an atmosphere of intimidation".

YET the committee seemed completely unable to address the very obvious possibility that what was going on was not just a few individual lapses but a co-ordinated campaign. It chose to explain away or ignore two of the most obviously unusual aspects of the operation of Dublin County Council in those years - the remarkable consensus between the bulk of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael councillors on rezoning issues, and the odd phenomenon of councillors from one part of the county proposing rezonings in another area.

The apparent co-ordination of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael strategies is dismissed as a mere practical detail: "Councillors who referred to the matter, by and large saw it as part of the normal process of political life. The comment was made that somebody had to make sure that the place worked." The obvious question - worked for whom? - is not asked.

When it comes to dealing with councillors from one area proposing rezonings in another - a practice that did much to deflect the wrath of aggrieved locals from their own representatives - the report adopts a different strategy. It simply denies it. Indeed, it actually suggests that the opposite was the case: "The strategy adopted by most councillors . . . was to depend on the advice and views of local area councillors when a particular matter presented itself for a decision."

These key weaknesses in the report and the extraordinarily bland reaction of the party leadership to its publication leave Fianna Fail in a strange no man's land. It has advanced beyond the bunker of denial, evasion and saying nothing, until the tribunals have reported. But it has not reached the new defensible position of complete openness and rigorous reform.

As the culture of concealment continues to unravel in the coming months, that middle ground will become an increasingly lonely and exposed place to be.

fotoole@irish-times.ie