The revelation that Fianna Fail received funding from companies by methods which were legally questionable and may even have broken the tax code would normally be expected to excite indignation on the part of the main opposition parties. So why, particularly, has the ever-excitable Fine Gael not gone into overdrive? Because it and the Labour Party were at the same squalid business.
The "pick me up" arrangement, as it is inelegantly described, involves a donor to a political party picking up the tab of the party for printing, advertising - or for some other goods or services - instead of paying the party directly. There are reasons why a donor would do this rather than pay the party directly. The first would be to disguise from their accountants or shareholders or board members or the public that the donation had been made. The second would be to offset the payment against corporation profits tax and/or to reclaim VAT. I suppose there could be another explanation for such an arrangement, but for the moment it escapes me.
If the purpose of the arrangement was to disguise the payment, it is likely that in so doing an offence was committed under company law. If the purpose was to offset the payment against corporations profits tax (in many instances the corporation profits tax would have been 40 per cent) the arrangement was illegal.
This is because only payments made wholly and exclusively for the purpose of the trade concerned could be treated in such ways for tax purposes. Unless, of course, the payment to the political party was indeed made wholly and exclusively for the purpose of trade - but if that were so, how could the payment be other than a bribe?
And there is a further dimension to this: if the payment was offset against corporation profits tax and, perhaps more particularly, if the VAT element of the payment was reclaimed, the question of fraud arises. And if the political parties were aware that the payments were being offset against corporation profits tax and/or that a VAT element was being reclaimed, then the parties would be complicit in the commission of the fraud.
Fianna Fail recently got an attack of anxiety about the practice and, according to Bertie Ahern, it submitted a series of examples of the "pick me up" arrangement to the Revenue Commissioners to determine the legality of it. No explanation has been given for the timing of the anxiety attack that led to the inquiry to the tax authorities. However, I can offer an explanation for the timing of the disclosure of the panic attack.
The disclosure was made a few hours after I had submitted a series of questions to Des Richardson, Bertie's close associate and now the Fianna Fail fund-raiser, about the practice. And I suspect that the panic attack was caused originally by an appreciation that the full dimensions of the £30,000 Fitzwilton payment to Ray Burke on June 7th, 1989, was about to become public.
In other words, that it would become known that only £24,000 of this £30,000 was paid from Fitzwilton coffers, the remaining £6,000 was paid by the taxpayer when the VAT was reclaimed.
Ruairi Quinn also got a panic attack about this, again when questions were submitted to him about payments from Fitzwilton. He said that Fitzwilton paid an advertising bill in connection with the Mary Robinson presidential campaign of 1990. I asked him if he thought this arrangement was legal and he said he didn't know.
If Fine Gael has had a panic attack, it has kept it quiet so far. If it has not had a panic attack, either it still fails to comprehend the significance of what it has engaged in over several years or it doesn't care because Fianna Fail is more likely to get the blame.
Can there be any wonder any longer why the public should be cynical about politicians? Why should the public be otherwise when the three main political parties engage in such practices. All in the interests of getting money for themselves.
The public has other reasons to be cynical, of course, not least because of the latest revelations concerning the Ray Burke affair.
On Wednesday of last week the former Fianna Fail director of finance and now TD for Laois Offaly, Sean Fleming, said the following:
"In July or August 1997 the (Fianna Fail) party general secretary, Mr Pat Farrell, contacted me and asked me whether Mr Ray Burke had given £10,000 to Fianna Fail head office in June 1989. I visited party headquarters and checked the cash receipts book and was satisfied we had received £10,000 through Mr Ray Burke during the June 1989 election campaign and that this contribution had been from Rennicks. "I informed the general secretary verbally of this matter and he was then able to confirm receipt of the £10,000. Mr Des Richardson, the party's fund-raiser, was in the room during some of this meeting."
Obviously something had happened in July/August last year to give rise to this question. And by far the most likely happening was that Ray Burke himself had volunteered this information - that he had given £10,000 to the Fianna Fail head office in June 1989 - after the Sunday Business Post had reported that he had been given a large amount of money by JMSE. Mr Burke, most likely, was then protesting that whereas he did indeed get £30,000 from JMSE he handed over £10,000 of it to Fianna Fail.
If that is so, Sean Fleming would have been able to provide Pat Farrell with information that Ray Burke's claim was false - that the £10,000 he paid to Fianna Fail came not from JMSE but from Rennicks.
It is, however, possible that Sean Fleming was asked simply to check whether Ray Burke paid over £10,000 to Fianna Fail in June 1989 and was not told why the question arose. And it is possible that once Sean Fleming established that Ray Burke did indeed pay over the money then he simply said so and said nothing about Rennicks. Or at least he said nothing about Rennicks while Des Richardson was in the room, and that although he said it to Pat Farrell, Mr Farrell did not fill in Des Richardson on this additional and crucial information.
It is further possible that although both Pat Farrell and Des Richardson knew that the £10,000 came from Rennicks and not from JMSE, as Ray Burke was claiming, they did not tell Bertie Ahern about it. But are any of these propositions likely?