Former taoiseach Albert Reynolds has confirmed that he tried to stop the late Seán Doherty from making his public statement in 1992 that Charles Haughey had had detailed knowledge of the tapping of journalists' phones.
Mr Reynolds told The Irish Times yesterday that this was because he believed at the time his campaign to replace Mr Haughey as taoiseach was close to success and he did not want some new element of public controversy to emerge that would have an impact on the situation.
He was responding yesterday to the account by communications consultant Terry Prone of her role in preparing Mr Doherty for his press conference in Dublin's Montrose Hotel, in which he said he had shown numerous transcripts of phone conversations between journalists Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy and cabinet ministers to Mr Haughey.
Ms Prone told RTÉ's News at One programme yesterday that when Mr Reynolds was told by her husband and business partner, Tom Savage, that Mr Doherty was about to say Mr Haughey had known about the phone tapping in great detail 10 years earlier, he (Mr Reynolds) said Mr Savage had to find a way to stop him. She said she did not know why he did this, but she believed Mr Doherty's proposed action "was putting whatever plans Mr Reynolds had in jeopardy, and it was not something he either wanted or approved of".
Mr Reynolds confirmed this yesterday, saying his campaign was going the way he wanted and he did not want some new issue to interfere with it. He heard about what Mr Doherty was going to say in part one of his revelations - on RTÉ's Nighthawks programme - late in the evening on the night of the broadcast. "I sent colleagues to try to locate him, to tell him that if he felt he was doing it to my benefit, he was not."
Asked why he had thought it would not have been to his benefit to have Mr Haughey further damaged, he said: "The campaign was going the way we wanted it to go. We didn't need it. So why involve something else we couldn't control?"
He said he had no specific recollection of talking to Tom Savage just before the second part of Mr Doherty's revelations - his press statement at Dublin's Montrose Hotel in which he said he had shown transcripts of bugged phone conversations to Mr Haughey. He was not saying this conversation did not happen and it could well have "because it was my view at the time".
Ms Prone said yesterday she wanted to correct the version of events given by some that what Mr Doherty said at the hotel that night was filled with lies.
She wrote in the Examiner newspaper yesterday that Mr Doherty and his wife, Maura, had come to her about 10 days after the Nighthawks programme. Brian Lenihan snr had recommended that he do so. His Nighthawks remarks that unnamed others had known of the phone tapping had created a "media frenzy" and he wanted to end this. Mr Lenihan told him that Ms Prone's company, Carr Communications, could provide him with "a formula of words" to get him out of the situation.
When Mr Doherty told Ms Prone that what he had said on Nighthawks was true, Ms Prone told him the only way out of this, therefore, was to tell lies, and she would not help him to do this. Mr Doherty's wife, Maura, then urged her husband to tell the truth. "You're telling the truth, now. You've taken enough. Covered up enough. You've been the fall guy long enough. You've suffered plenty and so have all your family. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to us. To tell the truth. Now."
Mr Doherty began to weep. They had a long conversation in which he tried to justify the phone tapping as a measure against treason, which, he said, was the word for the actions of ministers who were seeking to bring about the collapse of their own government by leaking to the press.
He went to his car and brought back "an armful of typescripts". He selected one page that showed a conversation between the late George Colley, than a minister, and Geraldine Kennedy. Mr Colley had made clear in the conversation that he wished to bring down the government, he said, and this was "the quintessential definition of treason".
He said Mr Haughey had not told him to initiate the phone tappings, but that his personality was such that those working to him would do whatever they believed "The Boss" would want without asking or telling him.
Mr Doherty had become "shrivelled and humiliated" by the events that followed. This finally led him to blurt out part of the truth, without having planned to, on Nighthawks.
After 3½ hours Ms Prone left the room and wrote up four pages based on what Mr Doherty had told her. She arranged for a room to be booked in the Montrose Hotel, and for a press conference. Mr Doherty agreed to the arrangements. "He nodded, grey in the face from tiredness. He could not have been more frightened had his life been threatened. But most of all, Seán Doherty was sad. Infinitely, bleakly, sad."
However, the view that Mr Doherty's Nighthawks comments were accidental is disputed by programme presenter Shay Healy. Last night, he said Mr Doherty had made a point of coming to him after the programme's taping had finished. "He said: 'You did notice that I said something there that I have not said before'. I told him that I hadn't, but that I would remember that when I was watching the tapes," he said.