Appearing before the tribunal was very intimidating and I was glad to be accompanied and represented so ably there by my dear friend and legal advisor, Hugh Campbell. The court room was in a huge complex of buildings. When you were called, you had to put your hand on the Bible in front of you before you gave your testimony. I was in the Seanad by that stage, where as I have said, I had the excellent Eamonn McCormack as my Private Secretary. Eamonn would later tell me that, the day after I had been at the tribunal, an up-and-coming government member at the time had stopped him as he was passing, saying, ‘So, what do we make of your lady, running up to the tribunal, causing trouble for the Taoiseach and inventing stories?’ Eamonn had simply replied, ‘She told the truth — and if you don’t tell the truth in a tribunal, it is perjury.’
Eamonn and I had already discussed this, and had decided that this is what he should say to anyone who brought up the matter with him. The one person who never mentioned the tribunal to me was Bertie, which I suppose in hindsight is pretty damning in its own way. He said nothing directly to me, but I knew he was very annoyed about it. Typical of Bertie, his way of dealing with it was to have others say that my testimony was all an invention: that I was losing it and didn’t know what I was talking about. In light of this, I was very pleased that when the final report of the tribunal was in due course made public, it stated, in relation to my testimony: ‘The Tribunal in particular noted, and accepted, the clear recollection Mrs O’Rourke had of the meeting and, in particular, her vivid memory of Mr Flynn having invited her to join the meeting and the manner in which he effected his albeit perfunctory introduction to her of Mr Gilmartin. The Tribunal was satisfied that Mrs O’Rourke’s evidence in relation to the meeting was entirely truthful.’
While others had allegedly forgotten all about it, the details of that particular day in February 1989 were etched clearly in my mind. There wasn’t a meeting as such — it was more that Pádraig Flynn had had Tom Gilmartin brought into the Dáil and was doing his ‘Mr Big’ act, hauling Ministers in to meet him by way of demonstrating his own importance to Gilmartin: ‘Here is the Minister for Education’, and so on and so forth. No wonder I remembered it so clearly, with the declamatory way in which Flynn was carrying on! I was called in and there were five or six others in the room — it was more of an informal gathering than an official meeting. There was Ray Burke, Bertie Ahern, Pádraig Flynn of course, Brian Lenihan Snr (by the time the tribunal came around, Brian was no longer alive), Gerry Collins and me. As Pádraig fetched me in, he was saying in a big, booming voice, ‘Mr Gilmartin, this is our lady Minister, the eminent Mary O’Rourke for Education — what do you make of that, now?’ Gilmartin had a kind comment for me — he had remembered that my mother had recently died and he said, ‘I have already said to Brian here and I would like to say to you too, I am sorry for your recent loss. The Scanlans were a fine family.’ So Gilmartin registered with me because of this: as I said at the tribunal, you remember people who sympathise with you.
I didn’t stay very long after this introduction, but left to go about my business. According to Tom Gilmartin’s later account, a little later that day outside the room where we met, a fellow had come up to him and said, ‘You are going to be helped — sure, look at all the Ministers you have met. You will be helped every step of the way, but we need money for access.’ Now I didn’t see that person myself, as I was no longer there by that time. And I genuinely had no idea what Pádraig Flynn was doing that day — I thought he was just being Pádraig Flynn: a big, bombastic buffoon.
Over and above the Mahon Tribunal and all that it brought to light about certain individuals in the party, I can attest to the fact that in a more general sense there has been in recent years a degree of disintegration in the social cohesion and sense of individual and collective responsibility within Fianna Fáil. One field in which I experienced this for myself was the whole area of party fundraising — an activity which has always been a knotty issue for political parties in general. Before going any further however, it is appropriate that I should emphasise that fact that all political parties undertake various fundraising activities. They need to keep their parties afloat, and in Ireland, particularly as regards the larger parties of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, fundraising has always been a necessary and unavoidable part of the political process.
My own experience of party fundraising goes back to 1993, at a time when Fianna Fáil and Labour were in government together under Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach. I was Minister of State for Labour Affairs to Ruairi Quinn as Minister for Employment and Enterprise — a collaboration which, as I have said earlier, I very much enjoyed. During this period, Bertie Ahern was Treasurer of the Fianna Fáil organisation. It was well-known in the party generally that we were very much in debt at Fianna Fáil Head Office.
One day when I was working in my office in the Department, I received a telephone call from a man who introduced himself as Tony Kenna. He said that he was ringing at Bertie Ahern’s behest and was asking for an appointment with me. We duly fixed a time and day for a meeting and he came to see me as planned. His tale was that Bertie Ahern, as Treasurer of Fianna Fáil, was trying to drum up financial support so that he would clear the debt at the party’s HQ. To that end they were asking all of the Fianna Fáil Ministers to become engaged in a fundraising effort. Tony then proceeded to put two possible courses of action to me, emphasising all the while that the first one was the more desirable. This was that I would host a dinner party in a private house for, say, 10 or 12 carefully selected guests, and at which either Albert Reynolds or Bertie Ahern would be in attendance for the evening. I would act as hostess, and each guest would come along, eat their dinner and socialise, and then leave an envelope with a donation for Fianna Fáil at the end of the night. The alternative course of action Tony was proposing was that I could run a golf competition within my constituency, the proceeds of which would go to Fianna Fáil HQ.
My immediate response was to ask, regarding the first option, whether I myself would be expected to cook the dinner for the glitzy event in the private house. Tony quickly assured me that no, the owner of the glamorous house would arrange for the cooking of the glitzy dinner: my job was just to be there as a Fianna Fáil Minister, to be pleasant to everyone and, putting it crudely, to rake in the cash for the party. I didn’t like the idea of it then and I don’t like the idea of it now. However, as regards the alternative option, the difficulty for me was that I knew nothing whatsoever about golf. Despite the fact that I was brought up in the Hodson Bay Hotel in Athlone, right in the middle of a golf course, I had never so much as taken a golf club in my hand! To be honest, I had always thought of golf as a waste of time and effort — you hit a ball and nobody hits it back to you; you walk after it and you hit it again: where was the point in that? Before all of the diehard golfers descend upon me in outrage, I have to stress that this was just my own take on golf and I didn’t expect everyone to feel as I did!
Anyway, I told Tony Kenna that I would have a think about these options and let him know of my decision in due course. That weekend at home, I discussed the matter with Enda and Mícheál Ó’Faoláin. The three of us decided against the dinner party possibility — none of us liked the sound of it at all. My difficulty with it was that I would be required to hold out my hand and take the envelope. Although being in a posh house with glamorous people eating a glitzy dinner might have had a certain appeal, I just didn’t see myself in that role. So we decided that we would run the golf competition. Enda had in fact played golf some years earlier and Mícheál was himself a dedicated and indeed a very good golfer.
When I went back to Dublin the following week, I contacted Tony Kenna and told him that we had opted to raise funds for Fianna Fáil through the running of a golf tournament and competition. It was definitely the preferable option as far as I was concerned, also because it struck me that at the time, plenty of people from all sorts of organisations — GAA clubs, charities, and so on — were running such event
s. In fact, such competitions and indeed golf clubs in themselves, had become all the rage in those days. In Athlone alone, we had the new Glasson Golf and Country Club.
And so in 1993 we ran the first of our golf competitions. The inaugural one was held at the Athlone Golf Club and went very well indeed. So that there would be no confusion about it, the letter of invitation we sent out to potential participants and attendees, with my letterhead, stated clearly that any proceeds from the event would not be going to the local Fianna Fáil organisation or to me as constituency representative, but towards clearing a debt at Fianna Fáil’s national HQ. On that occasion, we raised about £20, 000 for HQ, and the event was deemed to be both a commercial and a sporting success.
From then on, we ran a golf competition each year. We built up a database of keen golfers, who were willing to participate and we kept adding to that list as time went on. Every year, the said Tony Kenna would come down to Athlone to take part himself, and I grew very fond of him and his lovely wife. There would always be a key Fianna Fáil figure in attendance too — Bertie Ahern, Charlie McCreevy, Brian Lenihan, Séamus Brennan, or any of the other luminaries within the party — who would come to lend their support and sometimes their own golfing skills to the national effort. We kept this up on an annual basis, and each year faithfully sent between £18,000 and £25,000 to Fianna Fáil HQ, meaning that over the entire period, we raised somewhere in the region of £200,000 for the national party through the golf competitions. My belief at the time was that all the other TDS and Senators were doing the same. It was only later that I discovered that lots of people were running golf tournaments, but for the benefit of their own local organisations — in other words, that they were using the funds to forward their own political careers. I know it sounds naïve on my part now, but at the time, I was truly innocent of what was happening on this front. As leader, Bertie Ahern ran an enormous golf competition every year for his own constituency office in Drumcondra and for his local political organisation. This set an example of course for every other TD and Senator, and many thought they should do the same, until gradually there were just a few of us left running annual events for national Fianna Fáil.
I am not relating any of this in order to blow my own trumpet or boast about my virtuousness, but because I think it is indicative of the times in which we were and are living. I understand that other political parties, such as Fine Gael, have also run golf competitions of a similar kind for funding purposes at both national and local level. Of course, nobody finds anything wrong in that. To this day, however, I am glad that I took the golf competition route and steered clear of playing hostess at the glitzy dinners. That is a practice which has certainly been called into question in recent years, with stories abounding of dinners being held all over the country, where large cheques were handed over — it has become the stuff of tribunals, as we know. The whole question of political fundraising is one which I feel very much necessitates further discussion and analysis in a more general way. But in terms of our own party practices over the years, what bothered me about my own experience was the lack of clarity in the way things were done at times, and, as I have said, I believe that this contributed to a general breakdown of social cohesion and accountability within the party.
As this book testifies, I have been a member of Fianna Fáil for all my adult life, and indeed in my earlier years too. I have earned my living and worked hard and to the best of my ability as a public representative, and I have always been proud to be a member of Fianna Fáil. I find it utterly outrageous that it is considered nefarious to be a member — even a grassroots member — of our party, and as I write this today, this seems to be the common thread emerging in the media and in public discourse. I rail against the fact that there are many writers and commentators who in my opinion could be accused of breaching the code of incitement to hatred, in the way in which they write and talk about Fianna Fáil. ‘Toxic’, ‘disreputable’, ‘underhand’: all these adjectives about us are heaped one upon another. I feel it is strongly reprehensible and grossly unfair to the ordinary men and women throughout the country who are the foot soldiers, unpaid, of the party of Fianna Fáil. How dare people cast aspersions upon them?
It is as if over all of the years, the pent-up hatred of the success of Fianna Fáil has cut loose and commentators are giving vent to it, and in a way that completely lacks proportion or even-handedness. Micheál Martin, our current leader, is doing his best to bring the party back up from the abyss into which we plunged after the General Election of February 2011. He has some task ahead of him, particularly in the chilly, unforgiving political climate in which we now find ourselves.
Chapter 23
‘SLEEP THAT KNITS UP THE RAVELL’D SLEAVE OF CARE . . .’
After losing my seat in the February 2011 General Election, I picked myself up pretty quickly, reasoning that I had had a great run of it. It was a consolation to me also to know that Longford–Westmeath had at least returned one Fianna Fáil TD in Robert Troy — unlike in so many other constituencies, where there was no Fianna Fáil TD at all. While I knew that my time as a Fianna Fáil aspirant or TD was now at an end, I certainly did not feel in any sense that life was over for me in a more general way.
The night I came back from my final defeat, I made up my mind that I was going to write this book, and in the days and weeks which followed, I took up my tape recorder and started to record some of my thoughts and put some order on the various key events in my career. Indeed, during that period in February and March 2011, I was chiefly obsessed with two things: gathering material for my book and, even more intensely, my nephew Brian and his struggle with his illness. By day, I was working on the book, at night I was hardly sleeping and waking up very early, thinking about Brian and waiting for his next call — and there were many of those.
In mid-March 2011, just a month after the February election and all that it had brought, I was contacted by Professor Ciarán Ó Catháin, Director of Athlone Institute of Technology, who told me that the Institute wished to confer a distinguished fellowship of life’s work on Patrick Cooney, myself and two other local business people, Dr Donald Panoz of Elan and Stephen Grant of Grant Engineering. The professor explained that Paddy Cooney and I were being so honoured for our lives of political endeavour, and for all the efforts we had made on behalf of the college during our years in politics. I have to say, it gave me a psychological boost to be so contacted, especially so shortly after the events of the previous month, and I was delighted to accept this honour.
In due course, I was contacted by Dr Eoin Langan, Head of the Business School at AIT, who had been nominated to read the citation on me at the ceremony. He came out to see me and we went through various points together. The date for the event had been fixed for Tuesday, 29 March. I was asked to give a list of the names of people I would like to invite to the ceremony, and the college sent out the formal invitations on my behalf.
I asked my two sons Feargal and Aengus, with their wives Maeve and Lisa, and their children. I asked Gráinne, my friend and niece; my two sisters-in-law Eithne and Maureen; Mícheál Ó’Faoláin and his wife Maura (who were unfortunately away on holidays and so could not attend); Hugh and Celine Campbell; Niall and Angela McCormack; John and Mary Butler; Seán Rowland; Breda Browne who had run my constituency office in Athlone and her husband Seamus, also an old and long-standing political friend. I also asked Brian and Patricia Lenihan, Ann and Anita Lenihan and my sister, Anne, and her husband. Anne’s husband, Seamus, was not well enough to come so they had to decline with regret, likewise Ann and Anita. Patricia could not attend either, but to my delight, Brian said that he would be there, and I was happy to know he was coming.
When the big day dawned, I went to the college in good time, looking forward very much to the ceremony ahead. It was a solemn event, as well it should have been, bearing in mind the huge honour which was being bestowed upon us. Paddy Cooney and I metaphorically clung to one another: both of us were, as I have sai
d, the political nominations and we had much in common, in our love of Athlone, our love of politics, and most of all in our work and love for the college. As I have mentioned earlier in this book, my interest in the college, and that of the Lenihan family go back a long, long time. I had always been very proud of the fact that during his time as a TD for Longford–Westmeath and when the locations for Regional Colleges were being decided at Cabinet level, my father pushed to have Athlone chosen as one of the sites. Hence the long link between me and this establishment. In an important, emotional way, my abiding love affair with AIT was cemented on that Tuesday in March 2011, when I received my fellowship from them in front of my friends and family.
I was honoured that Brian came, and in fact it was to be his last full public engagement. The college was understandably also very proud of the fact that he had taken the trouble in his last illness to come along that day. They put on a wonderful lunch buffet and we all enjoyed ourselves. I have great photographs of that special afternoon. Brian telephoned me later that day when he got back to Dublin to say how proud he was of me.
Brian had brought with him a young man called Brian Murphy, who had worked as a researcher and speech writer in the Office of the Taoiseach, under Bertie Ahern and later under Brian Cowen. He was a fine man whom we all held in fond regard around the Houses of the Oireachtas. Brian Jnr’s wife Patricia had thought that it would be better for him to have a companion with him for the drive to and from Athlone, and hence Brian Murphy had come along too. I was not to know until a couple of weeks later in fact, when Brian Murphy rang me one evening to thank me for the event, that when they had left the college, Brian said to him, ‘I’ll show you Athlone.’ It seems that they had driven all around the town, as Brian had pointed out the old River Bridge, the Batteries, the Napoleonic fortifications, the house on Retreat Road where he had been brought up as a child, the Marist Brothers where he went to primary school, St Mel’s Park, and all the other old familiar places. It was as if he knew it would be his last trip to Athlone, the place he always regarded as his home town.
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