Bertie - In Crisis Veritas

Ok. Let’s try to make sense of all of this.

First of all, the tribunal has been unsuccessful in its attempts to discover details of Bertie Ahern’s separation agreement. The Taoiseach has not disclosed this information, despite his very public statements that he has revealed everything.

Another problem is that the Taoiseach has cited the financial settlement of his separation as having led him to need the ‘hand-out’ in Manchester. Unless the Taoiseach passes on the details of the separation, however, the Taoiseach’s statement remains unsubstantiated.

With regard to what we do know, albeit from leaks, we can say the following:

Bertie Ahern opened an AIB loan account in his own name in December 1993.

This was followed by the opening of a savings account in the same AIB branch – O’Connell Street – on 30 December 1993. This account was opened with a lodgement of £22,500, which was later followed by a lodgement of £27,164. This gave the account its maximum allowed savings balance of £50,000, once interest was taken into consideration.

A year later, this money was withdrawn by Celia Larkin, who used it to open up a separate account in her own name. This was the account used by Celia Larkin to pay for “decoration and furnishings and soft furnishings and things like that” to Michael Wall’s house on Beresford Avenue.

Miss Larkin then opened another account, and into this one she lodged £28,000 which had been handed over by Mr. Wall. This account was used to pay for the construction of a conservatory “and stamp duty and things like that for the house.”

The money for the “soft furnishings” was later withdrawn from the first account and kept in a safe in St. Luke’s.

When asked why Bertie Ahern withdrew £50,000 from a high interest savings account in order to keep in a safe in St. Luke’s – thereby losing out on any return from interest – Miss Larkin said that “Bertie dealt in cash. I think he felt more comfortable with it.” Bertie Ahern was finance minister at the time.

Mr. Wall told the tribunal that he was looking for a house in Dublin, and that he had looked at a couple of properties. “I didn’t just buy the first one that came on the market,” he said. However, the house on Beresford Avenue was not found by Mr. Wall, but by Miss Larkin and Mr. Ahern. For his part, Mr. Wall never saw the inside of the Beresford Avenue house – a house for which he subsequently paid £138,000. “I went and had a look at it from outside”, he told the tribunal. “I was quite happy that that was a nice area and it suited, and so was Bertie, and I just thought, well okay, that suits me and that suits him.”

There is no explanation given as to why a house that suited both Mr. Wall and Mr. Ahern, nonetheless, needed almost £80,000 in renovations.

Again, to recap.

According to Celia Larkin’s testimony, Mr. Wall spent £28,000 on the construction of a conservatory and on an outstanding stamp duty bill, while Mr. Ahern spent £50,000 on “soft furnishings.”

Mr. Wall also spent an additional £10,800 on an outstanding deposit for the house, and gave a further £6,000 to his solicitor. He then left another £3,000 with Miss Larkin and Mr. Ahern– again all separate to the original £30,000 – “in case there was further work to be done.” Mr. Wall also reimbursed Mr. Ahern for monies spent on repairs to the house after it was damaged. That makes a figure of £49,800 that Mr. Wall spent on the Beresford Avenue house – all separate to the £138,000 he spent on the actual purchase. For his part, Mr. Ahern spent £50,000 on soft furnishings.

That gives a final figure of at least £237,800 absorbed by a very modest house on Beresford Avenue, Dublin, at a time when the average house price in the city was £65,000, and the top end of prices for the Griffith Avenue area was around £110,000.

It simply lacks credibility.

(Quotes and figures taken from the Irish Mail on Sunday, 6 May 2007)