Ahern too busy to tell former secretary about error

STERLING TRANSACTIONS:FORMER TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern has said he was too busy to tell his former secretary, Gráinne Carruth, that she had made a mistake when she had denied she carried out sterling transactions on his behalf.

The tribunal heard that Mr Ahern was informed about the evidence of the sterling transactions – carried out in what was the Irish Permanent Building Society from March to October 1994 – in early March 2008. This was 19 days before Ms Carruth took the stand and was forced to admit she had carried out the transactions.

Mr Ahern said yesterday Ms Carruth may have forgotten she had lodged sterling for him because he may have sent his security officer to the bank with her. The security officer would have carried the money over and then handed it to her in the bank, he said.

Counsel for the tribunal, Des O’Neill SC, asked Mr Ahern if he had contacted Ms Carruth in advance of her taking the stand. Mr Ahern said he did not.

“Had you done so, she would have been in a different position,” Mr O’Neill said.

Mr Ahern said he did not know Ms Carruth was going to take the stand until he was in Brussels the week after he was sent the evidence. He said he tried to make a practice of not contacting other witnesses. “But to be frank . . . I was just busy,” he said.

An interview with Bryan Dobson in which Mr Ahern said he would have spoken to Ms Carruth in advance of her evidence “if they had bothered to ask or tell me the information” was read into the record. Mr O’Neill said the remark was “totally untrue”.

Mr Ahern said before he got back from a trip to the US the tribunal “had Gráinne Carruth in here trying to hang her”. Judge Alan Mahon said the tribunal was not trying to hang Ms Carruth.

“If you want to justify your existence and say you were right, I’ll fight you tooth and nail in here and outside that you’re wrong,” Mr Ahern told Mr O’Neill.