In September 1992, Fianna Fail gave the beef tribunal a list of financial contributions it had received over the previous decade from companies in the beef industry. Among them was the company which received the most obvious and startling benefits from governments led by Charles Haughey, Goodman International. The two largest Goodman donations were each for £50,000. One was received in February 1987, the other in June 1989, during what we now know was an extraordinary period of fund-raising by Charles Haughey, Ray Burke and Padraig Flynn. This second donation has suddenly become very interesting indeed.
At the weekend, Jody Corcoran revealed in the Sunday Independent, in a report confirmed by The Irish Times yesterday, that this payment of £50,000 was, along with payments around the same time by Mark Kavanagh and Michael Smurfit, listed in the Fianna Fail cash books as "anonymous". This was clearly not because the money was given anonymously. Although the Sunday Independent suggested that "it may be that the beef tribunal missed the 1989 donation because it was listed as anonymous on Fianna Fail's records", the donation was in fact declared by Fianna Fail to the tribunal as having come from "the Goodman Organisation/Larry Goodman". This is what is significant about it.
We now know what it meant when a donation was listed as "anonymous" on the Fianna Fail record books. It meant, as the former party financial controller Sean Fleming has explained, that Charles Haughey had given specific orders as to how it was to be handled - "the word anonymous was used at the direction of the Taoiseach (Mr Haughey)". It also meant receipts for the donation were not sent to the donor (in this case Larry Goodman or his company) but "were transmitted to Mr Haughey or to his office".
In some cases, as with Mark Kavanagh's £100,000 donation at the same time, this strange procedure meant Charles Haughey handled some or even most of the money that had been handed over for the party. The amount recorded as an anonymous donation in the books may represent merely a fraction of what was received. We simply don't know whether this was the case with the Goodman money.
WHAT we do know for certain is that these "anonymous donations" were solicited by Charles Haughey and handled either by him or by his office. The first significant thing here is that this is entirely at odds with what the beef tribunal was told by Fianna Fail. Charles Haughey denied under oath that he ever discussed anything other than specific policy plans for the beef industry with Larry Goodman. The party general secretary, Pat Farrell, told the tribunal that all funds were raised by party fund-raisers and not by politicians. The latter, he insisted, were kept in the dark as to who was or was not coughing up, "specifically, our politicians do not know who contributes to the party or how much".
Since he gave this evidence under oath, it must be assumed this is what the then party general secretary honestly believed. But someone within the central party organisation must have known that this was untrue. To be able to list the £50,000 donation as coming from Goodman, someone had to go to the records, find it listed as "anonymous", go to the second list, which contained a key to these special donations, and discover who it came from. Whoever was in a position to do this would have realised that Charles Haughey had received money from Larry Goodman at a time when the relationship between the Fianna Fail minority government and the Goodman organisation had yielded extraordinary benefits for the beef baron. This highly significant fact might have changed the whole nature of the beef tribunal.
It also seems obvious that whoever was involved in preparing information for the beef tribunal would have had to check all donations listed as "anonymous". The payments by Mark Kavanagh and Michael Smurfit, in other words, would have been checked before mid-September 1992 when the list was produced. Yet the fate of those contributions was not, apparently, brought to the notice of any senior figures.
There is another remarkable feature of the list of Goodman donations given to the beef tribunal in 1992. While the £50,000 payment from Goodman on June 15th, 1989, was on it, a further payment of £25,000 two days later was not. This cheque emerged at the Moriarty tribunal, where it was described as a contribution from Larry Goodman to Brian Lenihan's medical expenses. But the cheque, signed by Larry Goodman and drawn on Allied Irish Banks in Dundalk, was made out to "Fianna Fail (Party Leadership Fund)" and seems not to have been used for Mr Lenihan's benefit.
All of this raises important questions. Who in Fianna Fail traced the "anonymous" donation to Goodman? Why did no one in the party tell the tribunal it had been handled and recorded in this highly unusual way? Why was the tribunal not told that, because of the way it was recorded, it must have been solicited by Charles Haughey? Why did no one come forward to correct Pat Farrell's evidence that a politician like Charles Haughey would not know who was giving money to the party? Why was information on a £25,000 cheque from Larry Goodman made out to Fianna Fail withheld from the tribunal? Did Bertie Ahern, who had not formally become party treasurer but was acting "in that area" at this time, have any involvement in the preparation of what was the first and only declaration of political contributions by the party?
The only way for these questions to be answered is for the Moriarty tribunal to complete the unfinished business of the beef tribunal. By looking closely at that list of donations presented in 1992 it should be able to discover a great deal about the system that allowed Charles Haughey to siphon off party funds for his personal use. It might also give a clearer picture of why Fianna Fail withheld information about the "anonymous" donors for so long.