The Taoiseach has said there was "no deliberate or malicious leak" from his office in relation to a parliamentary reply which was received by the media before being placed on the Dail record. Mr Ahern told the Dail it was not his "practice to go about the business of blackening people".
However, Fine Gael was last night still refusing to accept the Taoiseach's assurance that "the information that was honestly believed to be on the public record was given to the media in the course of inquiries and nobody from my office contacted anyone from the media with this information".
The deputy leader of Fine Gael, Mrs Nora Owen, commented: "A member of the Taoiseach's political staff is being named as the person involved in the matter of maligning Deputy John Bruton's name." She claimed that a "dirty tricks unit" was operating within the Taoiseach's office.
Mr Billy Timmins, Fine Gael TD for Wicklow, had asked the Minister for Finance whether his Department had sold any assets or property between 1987 and 1992 without putting the sale out to public tender. Last week, in a written reply, Mr McCreevy said it would not be possible to provide an answer until a later stage, as it had not been possible to compile a full reply.
However, at the same time, a draft reply which had been prepared by the Department of Finance was given to a journalist by a member of the Taoiseach's political staff. This indicated that in 1987 the then minister for finance, Mr Bruton, authorised the sale of a property to Irish Intercontinental Bank, which is at the centre of the current inquiry by three High Court inspectors into the Ansbacher affair.
The Taoiseach said that the information in the draft reply was "of little consequence and incriminates no one". He added: "The official involved, who was not familiar with the system of parliamentary questions, thought this parliamentary question was already in the public domain."
A full reply to the original question was last night given to Mr Timmins. It lists several cases in which the Department of Finance did not use a public tendering process when selling off properties and assets. These included the sale of shares in a number of oil companies and IDA-assisted companies and the sale of the State-owned B&I Line to the Irish Continental Group in 1991.