Opposition: Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell have reached "a secret deal" to ensure that Mr Ahern escapes responsibility for accepting payments in the 1990s, the Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, has said.
Demanding that Mr Ahern acknowledges that he behaved wrongly when he speaks in the Dáil tomorrow, Mr Kenny said the session should "be one of the most important events in our democracy in the past 10 years".
Pointing to Mr Ahern's article in the News of The World yesterday, Mr Kenny said Mr Ahern had still given no signal that he is prepared in any way to accept blame.
"In a newspaper article today the Taoiseach emphatically states 'I have done nothing wrong' and 'I stand over everything I have done'. This determination to refuse to accept responsibility is as clear now as it was when he told the Dáil last Wednesday that it was not wrong to accept this money.
"The attitude of the Taoiseach, the antics of Fianna Fáil Ministers who turn verbal cartwheels to avoid straight answers and now the flip-flop of the PDs, whose rediscovery of standards was short-lived, demonstrate conclusively that we have a Government that has been in power for too long.
"A Government that is so consumed by its grip on power that it has lost any sense of right and wrong, of accepting responsibility for mistakes, of being truly accountable," the FG leader added.
In his RTÉ interview last week, Mr Ahern said he had refused an offer from friends in 1993 to hold a fund-raising function, with 25 to 30 people paying £1,000 to attend.
Mr Ahern said that he had turned that offer down because funds raised in that fashion would amount to "personal money. If anyone does that, it's for politics, so I refused," Mr Kenny quoted him as saying.
"However, [ Mr Ahern] sees nothing wrong in personally accepting €12,000 raised by a function in Manchester; this time it was €500 a head - 25 people. Why, by the Taoiseach's own stated standards, was it wrong in Dublin, but right in Manchester?
"What happened in 1993 and 1994 was wrong - it was wrong to conceal it for the last 13 years, wrong to hypocritically condemn others while knowing this had gone on, wrong to declare that he had done nothing wrong," said Mr Kenny.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party leader, Pat Rabbitte, said "a lot of the Ministers who have come out to defend Mr Ahern will have to live with the consequences of what they have said.
"If they can't say it's wrong, then there is something wrong in Irish politics. It was manifestly wrong, the Taoiseach should admit that it was wrong," he told TV3's The Political Party programme.
Led by Minister for Finance Brian Cowen, "a succession of Ministers have all sheltered behind the claim that no law was broken, no ethics guidelines were broken. We don't know of course that to be true," the Labour leader said.
Mr Rabbitte questioned the scale of the funds raised over the years for Mr Ahern's Dublin North Central constituency organisation based out of St Luke's in Drumcondra.
"It's been known for a very long time that Mr Ahern has raised very high amounts of money for the running of his constituency. One of the newspapers today deals with the St Luke's issue - apparently the property is worth in the order of two million. It is an immensely valuable asset, it would appear to be vested in a trust ... there may well be questions there," he told the programme.
Green Party TD John Gormley said the PD leader and Tánaiste, Michael McDowell, had led his party "to the top of the hill only to march them down again", now that he had backed away from signalling a willingness to quit office.
"His constant vacillation and equivocation on the Bertie issue reveals a man who wishes desperately to cling to power without losing face with those who elected him specifically to keep an eye on Fianna Fáil."
Mr McDowell is ready "to grant the Taoiseach a pardon, perhaps with a little slap on the wrist, if the Taoiseach manages even a semi-coherent version of events on Tuesday next", Mr Gormley said.
