Lowry tells Dáil notion he could have misled his colleagues is 'madness'

MICHAEL LOWRY insisted it was “madness’’ to suggest that he could have misled his then cabinet colleagues on the awarding of the second mobile phone licence.

“Does anybody here as a politician believe that John Bruton, Dick Spring and Proinsias De Rossa would be so stupid as to allow the likes of John Loughrey and myself to pull the wool over their eyes in some way or other?” he asked.

“I can say to you, as a practising politician, that if they were that stupid, they should never be in a position to hold any office, in government or anywhere else.”

Mr Lowry asked his Dáil colleagues to consider “the appalling vista” that would have arisen had his then cabinet colleagues decided to reject the decision of the project team set up to decide on the licence.

They would be talking now about a decision that had gone horribly wrong, because the decision of a project team, acting independently of the government of the day and himself as minister, would have been rejected.

Strongly refuting that he had delivered the licence for Denis O’Brien, Mr Lowry said no step was taken by him without full consultation with Mr Loughrey, who was an experienced, shrewd and cautious civil servant.

He said when he telephoned Mr Loughrey “the other day’’, the former secretary general said he would recheck the file and notes on the matter. “And he came back and told me that everything that was done was in accordance with procedure.”

Mr Lowry said that, when he went into the department, his officials told him that a rumour had to be dispelled that a former member of the Dáil had “an nest-egg” with one of the companies promised the licence.

“I did not manufacture that rumour,” said Mr Lowry. He insisted no money trail would come back to his door, adding “there never was money . . . there is no money’’.

Mr Lowry challenged those who had failed to secure the licence, and those who said there was something wrong with the process, to go to the courts.

“Go test it,” he said. “Put your money on the legal benches where it counts and you will get the answer from the courts because they will base their result on evidence and facts and not on innuendo and supposition.”

Mr Lowry accused the media of being “very gleeful in anticipation that I might go to jail because I broke a tax amnesty”. He said he had facilitated Revenue with a voluntary disclosure.

“Let me make it abundantly clear that the amnesty and my dealings with the Revenue were all open and all on the table and it was in the context of the amnesty that my full and final settlement was made with the Revenue in June 2007.”

In a lengthy statement, Mr Lowry said Mr Justice Moriarty had taken his terms of reference from the Dáil and converted them himself into an open-ended mandate without any restraint being shown. “The ultimate outcome of this process is a report which is filled with intemperate language that is professionally inappropriate, has no evidentiary framework or merit and makes claims that would not stand up to scrutiny in the local pub let alone an esteemed courtroom,” he said.