Ray Burke was a very busy man during the 1989 general election campaign. How busy? "You can take it it's a 24-hour day at that stage, as opposed to the usual 18," he told the tribunal, tongue partly-in-cheek.
Ten years on, the former minister was trying to piece together the circumstances of the fateful June meeting in the middle of that campaign. Some things he clearly remembered: there were three people in the room, not four as Mr James Gogarty claimed; the meeting was in the morning, not the afternoon; the donation was £30,000, not £80,000.
But other things he couldn't remember at all, like the size of the envelopes. They had to be "fairly reasonably-sized" to hold that amount of money, he agreed, but he resisted all promptings to call them "big". Even Mr Justice Flood had a go at jogging Mr Burke's memory, measuring a £50 note against his portable computer and suggesting the envelope would have to have been the size of a laptop; but the witness would not be drawn.
In their widely different accounts of the meeting, Mr Burke and Mr Gogarty are a bit like an old married couple remembering their honeymoon. But they do agree on one thing: a receipt or a thank-you note was neither expected nor given; and the tribunal was having a hard time yesterday understanding the former minister's apparent lack of gratitude.
Trying to explain, Mr Burke waxed philosophical. "The giving of money by a big company is an easy thing to do," he said; whereas, in a variation on the widow's mite, he implied he would be just as grateful for a tenner from a "working man". And there was no comparison at all with his gratitude to those who gave up their time during election campaigns to go out "knocking doors". Mr Burke kept saying "knocking doors" yesterday, suggesting there was more demolition than building work going on in north Dublin. But if it was a mistake, it was one of the few he made. He looked thoroughly relaxed in the witness box, even if he adopted a tactic normally used by cross-examining barristers, and avoided all eye contact with his questioner.
Gaze fixed on the chairman throughout, as though his neck was in a brace, he lost his cool only once; when, asked why JMSE had chosen him for a donation, rather than other local politicians, like Mr Charles Haughey, he accused counsel for the tribunal of "dragging Mr Haughey's name into it, quite gratuitously".
Mind you, there had been some heat in the exchanges earlier on, when the tribunal referee brandished a yellow card in the direction of counsel for Bovale Developments. Referring back to Tuesday's exchanges (on the subject of the Homers, Greek and Simpson) the chairman said Mr Colm Allen had used his right of audience "to level insults against counsel for the tribunal, and. . .used the opportunity offered to him to apologise to proffer further insults".
This "offensive and inappropriate" behaviour was not Mr Allen's first transgression, he added, and should there be another, the withdrawal of his right of audience would be considered. Mr Allen was temporarily silenced by Mr Justice Flood's words, a remarkable thing in itself; and when he later demanded a copy of them to consider "your attack on me personally," the chairman ordered him to resume his seat, which he did.
