Bertie Ahern, The National Lottery and the Phoenix Park Casion (and Tom Morrissey’s Bribe allegations)
Read more about: Bertiegate, Tribunals 
The Independent today has a story which seems to cast further cloud over Bertie Ahern in the period while he was Minister for Finance. With Mahon unlocking a lot of information from NCB and Des Richardson, it seems that further fuel has been added to the fire when it emerged that Ahern authorised the National Lottery to get involved in the mooted casino development at Phoenix Park racecourse. The developer in question has substantial links to Ahern;
The Taoiseach was the guest of Mr Turner at a number of games at Old Trafford when he was finance minister, at the same time as the latter was seeking to develop the casino, with Mr Ahern’s department okaying confidential National Lottery involvement in the project.
A month before the June 1997 election, Mr Ahern publicly opposed the casino, in which Mr Turner was also in partnership with Dublin jeweller and developer Robert White — a childhood friend of the Taoiseach’s.
In questions put by this newspaper during the election campaign, Mr Turner said he did not offer or give Mr Ahern money.
A spokesman for Turner echoed that Mr Turner has never given the Taoiseach a penny in his life — although it has now emerged that he gave $10,000 to Des Richardson in the exact timeframe in question.
On top of this Tom Morrissey alleged to the Independent last May that Turner had approached him with a £ 30,000 bribe, offering to put it into an account in the Cayman Islands for him. Morrissey made the allegation in May (election time) although it went unreported in the Independent until now, a question of rather large importance in itself-what was the motivating factor behind it (lack of legal-clarity, self-censorship, sensitivity to the election?)
Ahern’s reputation is slowly
We’ll have the perfect circle when the same name comes up in the UK Labour proxy donor scandal and Mahon — I’d say the odds are high of that happening given the focus on property developers in both affairs.
There was a huge groundswell of opposition to the Phoenix Park Casino at a time when the city had been turned into a mini Las vegas and one armed bandits were impoverishing the poorer citizens of Dublin with no political will to stamp them out.
Even when the law was finally changed to make heavy gambling illegal,on the one armed bandits, the casino owners continued as before selling tokens instead of updating their machines to new money. (in many cases these “tokens” were old irish pennies-which gambling arcade owners had retained from the time of the currency changeover)
The pennies were actually valued as large units of cents and when a machine paid out the pennies they were cashed in for their token value in large amounts of “real money” i.e. euros.
Ahern saw that the wind was overwhelmingly against the casino and altered tack on this basis-too many votes in jeopardy- the only basis they ever back off their pet projects.
Hi,, Its really nice work….Keep it up dude.
“Further Fuel to Fire” nicely said man and I am agreed with you.
I only would like to say that it is difficult to controll it. I think so.
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