A tribunal to investigate alleged payments to the former Taoiseach, Mr Haughey, was now inevitable and could not be avoided, Mr Desmond O'Malley TD has said. The former Progressive Democrats leader said that while Mr Haughey was Taoiseach, between 1987 and 1989, "truly inexplicable policy decisions" had been made. He believed these would have to be looked into by a future tribunal, to establish whether there was any connection between the decisions and any other donations to Mr Haughey.
A lot of these decisions had been "in the beef area," he said on RTE's News At One yesterday. "Too much has come out of the McCracken tribunal which the McCracken tribunal has been unable to pursue because of the terms of reference," he continued.
The beef tribunal did find an enormous amount of facts, Mr O'Malley said, but the difference between it and the McCracken tribunal was that "it didn't go on to ask why these things happened." He believed we must now ask why these things happened.
As a particular reason for another tribunal, he pointed to the Ansbacher deposits. It was known, he said, that Mr Haughey had access to the deposits and that £1.3 million went into them from Mr Ben Dunne. But "an awful lot more money was in those accounts."
It appeared, he said, that Mr Haughey's personal living expenses had been paid out of those accounts over a long period of years, and that the £1.3 million "would have only lasted for a relatively short period." He felt it was necessary to know the source of this income for the periods other than when Mr Dunne was Mr Haughey's benefactor.
He had been looking at the beef tribunal report again, particularly the first chapter. It said, he recalled, that the tribunal had got full co-operation from the political parties in relation to donations received by them and that it was satisfied such contributions were the normal contributions made to political parties.
But "it doesn't deal with contributions made to individual politicians, and I think that is significant," he said. He felt that perhaps the significance of this was not seen at the time.
He also noted that in the same first chapter, where the tribunal chairman, Mr Justice Hamilton, was setting out the parameters within which he was going to report, he had said that the then chief justice, Mr Justice Finlay, had laid down, "in the case of Goodman International and Laurence Goodman against the sole member of the tribunal (Mr Justice Hamilton)" that the tribunal was a simple fact-finding operation.
