Ahern's 'mafia' operate the best-oiled machine this country has ever seen
Sunday October 01 2006
Built around a suburban red-brick house in Drumcondra on the outskirts of Dublin the smooth-running constituency organisation has effectively kept Mr Ahern in high office for more than a decade.
It is here he planned his strategy to take control of Fianna Fail. It is here that his close political confidants meet, away from the prying eyes of other politicians and the press. It is here the deals are done that ensure Bertie Ahern stays where he is as long as he wishes.
Only the enigmatic Bertie Ahern controls all the tentacles emanating from St Luke's, tentacles that burrow into the underbelly of Irish society.
To quote Charles Haughey, who took the young politician under his wing and invited Ahern to the influential 'Saturday mornings' in Abbeville, he is: "The most skilful, most devious, most cunning of them all."
Bertie Ahern appears uninterested in business success or social standing unlike his predecessor Albert Reynolds. Or money and privilege like his mentor Charles J Haughey.Nobody, it seems, knows who he really is. But political observers believe that his legendary detachment is a result of his cosy political set-up in St Luke's which takes care of his 'backyard', leaving him free to run the party and the country knowing that his base is secure and that the trusted few will tell him what he really needs to hear and not what they think he wants to hear.
It is a small coterie of people he trusts deeply who call to his office there and tell him what's really going on and what should be done about it.
Observers have noted that only rarely does he visit the Members' Bar in Dail Eireann to meet TDs in an informal setting. He almost never goes to the Visitors' Bar, where many politicians and senators hang out with journalists, businessmen, lobbyists and visitors.
Instead he returns to "the family" in St Luke's, his constituency office, to find out which way the wind isblowing.
He has an almost set routine, working there all day Saturday. He then goes to one of the local pubs, Fagans, Kennedy's or the Tolka House for a few drinks with his pals. He follows the same routine on a Sunday except when there's a football match on in Croke Park or Dublin are playing within striking distance. Around Christmas when the rest of the country is lazing about, Bertie is pottering around St Luke's, finding things to do even answering the telephone to constituents looking to have some mundane issue taken care of.
It is a ritual that seems detached from his gracious office in Government Buildings on Merrion Street or the other great edifices such as Farmleigh where he could avail of a cosy weekend whenever he felt a need to be pampered.
The house is a smart but modest red-brick building on the main artery connecting Drumcondra with the airport. Any Saturday you pass St Luke's you will see the Taoiseach's black Mercedes waiting at the kerb as he works inside.
"There is a bar just to the rear which is used for occasional entertaining for periodic constituency organisation cheese-and-wine evenings. It is principally this bar that gives the place its quaint country-hotel aspect. The pumps on the bar counter include his own favourite trademark tipple, Bass," wrote John Downing, providing a physical description of the place, in his political biography of Bertie Ahern.
But the description hardly captures the intrigue within that gives the place such myth-making power in Fianna Fail.
St Luke's was bought by a group of trusted businessmen for Bertie Ahern when his marriage to Miriam broke up during his year as Lord Mayor of Dublin.
When the year came to an end, he didn't move back into the family home in Malahide, but into St Luke's which had been renovated by his builder friends with living quarters upstairs. His marriage was over and his relationship with Celia Larkin began inearnest.
The break-up was a bitter affair and despite his own strong Catholic convictions he and Miriam obtained a judicial separation. The case took four days when it was heard in Dolphin House, a family courthouse in the centre of Dublin.
Later Bertie admitted that they could have come to a much friendlier agreement had they not both consulted firms of lawyers to argue over the details of the settlement. News of the court case and the hard-fought settlement soon spread around the Dublin media and legal circles and like all good stories it took on a life of its own.
"I know all the rumours and so do Celia and Miriam, I can do sweet nothing about these things," said Bertie in his only public comment on those turbulent events in his personal life and the break-up of his marriage.
But even these remarks were shrouded in controversy. He later claimed it was an 'off-the-record' comment to two journalists who were writing a book about him and wanted to be "briefed". They disputed this version and said he knew, at the time, that the interview was being taped and that the quotes would be attributed to him.
"You can sound me out till the cows come home: you'll find no Garda reports, no barring orders, nothing. I'll tell you there's not a whole many things in my life that I can 110 per cent swear on, because I'm no more an angel than anyone else in this life, but of the barring orders there's zilch," continued Mr Ahern.
"There were no guards ever involved, to Celia's house, to Malahide, when I was in Pinebrook, before I was in Malahide. Ever. There was no barring order of any kind; there were no threatened barring orders.
"There was never a hospital incident. Celia fell at a party and that was it. And the following day she went out and joked about it with Mary Harney. It is rubbish, you can march into the Mater yourself and you will find nothing."
Happily, for the young politician, St Luke's was awaiting its new master and hisdestiny.
Upstairs there is a rather well-appointed apartment, a bathroom with gold taps and under-floor heating and some nice touches with regard to furnishing, which would indicate the hand of Celia Larkin, who would later emerge as a style guru in her own right.
When Bertie Ahern started living there, Celia was working downstairs as his 'constituency secretary'.
It was a relationship that would shortly develop and deepen and eventually become part of the legend of St Luke's.
Back then, it was an unknown Dublin solicitor and friend of Ahern's called Gerald M Brennan who put together the trustee agreement by which a group of businessmen and friends of Ahern, some of them in the construction business, agreed to buy, refurbish and fund St Luke's.
Of the trustees three of the four, Tim Collins, Des Richardson and Joe Burke, went on to become millionaires and members of important State boards and, in the process, they also paved the way for Bertie Ahern to take power in Fianna Fail and eventually see himself as Taoiseach.
Under the terms of the trusteeship, Bertie Ahern would have the use of the building and facilities for his lifetime in politics and only afterwards, when he had retired altogether, would it revert to his political party, Fianna Fail.
It was a neat deal.
Gerry Brennan, his trusted legal adviser and friend, committed suicide on May 24, 1997, just days before Bertie Ahern won the election that has put him in power for adecade. By then St Luke's was established as the power base of the new Bertie Ahern Fianna Fail and some of its main "fixers".
A great deal had happened in his public and private life in the meantime.
Installed in St Luke's, Celia Larkin was now indispensable in business and in his personal life. She was his eyes and ears in Drumcondra. When he was promoted to a job in the Department of Labour she went with him to an office in the department as 'constituency secretary', a Government job that enables ministers to save their seats by looking after constituents as well as running the country.
When he moved up the political ladder to the Department of Finance she followed after him, remaining an indispensable part of the Ahern 'machine'.
Bertie Ahern then began the process of acclimatising the general public to his 'situation'. Although it was well-known in politics and the media that Celia was his lover it wasn't publicly written about and commentators steered clear of the issue. Then one night he went on the Pat Kenny Show and admitted, unprompted, that he was separated like many other fathers in modern Ireland. He was carefully preparing public opinion for what wouldfollow.
When Charles Haughey resigned as Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fail in 1992 it was expected that Bertie Ahern would challenge Albert Reynolds for the job. But there were whispers in the Dail bar and around the corridors of power that TDs "would want to know where their leader slept at night". It was a clear reference to Ahern's marital status and in the end he didn't put his name forward.
Bertie Ahern, who had stood aloof as the Reynolds administration crumbled in confusion, was the natural successor and when he was appointed leader of Fianna Fail in 1994, his lover Celia Larkin was sitting quietly unnoticed in the hotel room where he gave his first press conference.
The pixie-faced Celia was bound to be noticed sooner or later, especially when she took over a plush office in Government buildings and a State salary of £36,000 a year.
Then in November 1994, in a move calculated to cement her position as the leader's consort, she was by Bertie Ahern's side when he formally took over as President of Fianna Fail from Albert Reynolds at a glittering party dinner in the Burlington Hotel in Dublin.
A few jaws dropped, some of the old guard who stood for the moral values of the Ireland of de Valera were scandalised, but most of the men in the mohair suits took a pragmatic view: a man's private life was his own affair. Celia Larkin's rise seemed to mirror that of Bertie. When he became Taoiseach she was appointed a 'special adviser' at a salary of over ?75,000. It was quite a step up in the pecking order. The girl who started in St Luke's addressing envelopes was now a force to be reckoned with.
She seemed to take high office in her stride. She already knew her way around the corridors of power. When it came to sharing out offices for the new administration she knew the system better than most and got herself allocated a grand big office in Government Buildings that had once belonged to the Labour Party leader Dick Spring when he was Tanaiste.
BUT it took another four years before Celia Larkin's name first appeared on an official government invite - to a dinner to be hosted by the Taoiseach for the President of the United States, Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, in Dublin Castle.
Until that day the "serious media" largely ignored her presence as the new face of modern Ireland. When questions were asked about her status, they were met with cold official silence.
But the era of the Taoiseach's partner had arrived.
As she travelled around the globe by government jet at the taxpayers' expense some of the more conservative clerics, Catholic and Protestant, began to be uneasy about how she had acquired the status of First Lady without actually being the prime minister's wife.
It was an invitation to a government event to celebrate the elevation of the ascetic and distant Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, to the rank of Cardinal which caused the most controversy.
The invite, coming as it did from "The Taoiseach and Celia Larkin", left the Cardinal himself embarrassed and displeased.
It was left to the editor of the Church of Ireland Gazette to thunder against this slight to the most senior cleric in the country, a man who had long promoted the sanctity of marriage. There was such a political and media furore that on the night of the reception in the State Apartment in Dublin Castle Celia Larkin was not in the official line-up to greet the elderly churchman of profoundly conservative views.
By 1999 Celia Larkin, who was now on first-name terms with Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton and had re-modelled Bertie Ahern into a reasonably elegant man, was no longer content with her role. She decided to give up her State-paid job as the Taoiseach's constituency secretary and leave politics, where she had spent her formative years.
She embarked on a new venture, a beauty salon intriguingly called Beauty at the Blue Door.
By the summer of 2003 her relationship with Bertie Ahern was over, although neither wanted to admit it and kept up the pretence that there was still a relationship.
Asked by gossip columnist Jason O'Callaghan if they still had a relationship Bertie Ahern answered: "As far as I know we do, I slept with her last night." It all seemed a little undignified for the head of a country to have to justify himself in such a way.
But at least the Taoiseach's political operation at St Luke's appeared to be running smoothly. It is funded by the money raised at an opulent dinner held each year in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham for the O'Donovan Rossa cumann of Fianna Fail.
The reality is that it is Bertie's annual fundraiser.
The dinner is attended by representatives of big business and builders and developers who take tables at ?500 a head for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with Bertie. Attendance is by invitation only. Those seeking an open door to the most powerful figure in the country come to pay their tribute and all the proceeds go to paying for a full-time staff, the upkeep of St Luke's and the considerable expense of running the best-oiled political machine ever seen in this country.
What made St Luke's so important to Bertie Ahern was that his close confidants weren't his family, they weren't even 'Fianna Fail'. In the five trustees of St Luke's, Bertie Ahern got men of visionbut also men completely loyal to his cause.
The men who set up St Luke's would ensure that Bertie Ahern never had to worry about money, but some of them also prospered in the process.
The least well-known was Jimmy Keane a local 'ward boss' who was a friend of Bertie Ahern's and a good man at guiding him through the labyrinthine world of local politics. He remained a largely anonymous figure as did another trustee, the late Jimmy Reilly.
But the other three trustees of St Luke's went on to become millionaires and prosper.
Des Richardson, a businessman and Fianna Fail's chief fundraiser certainly prospered. As well as his various business affairs he was appointed a director of the State airline Aer Lingus as a reward for his loyalty to Bertie Ahern and for his contribution to the foundation and running ofSt Luke's.
Joe Burke, a small building contractor, was "a close friend" of Bertie Ahern from the early days. When Bertie Ahern wanted someone to "take a look" at something, he would designate Joe Burke.
It was in this way that he got entangled with the whole planning saga of developer Tom Gilmartin which ended up before the Flood/Mahon Tribunal, looking at payments to politicians from developers.
Joe Burke too prospered from his connection with St Luke's. He was appointed a 'For some, St Luke's was about being close to the world of the Taoiseach. But for others, it was a means to oil the wheels of commerce'
member of the influential Dublin Port Company and rose to become executive chairman, earning himself a fat salary and a sleek Jaguar car for his loyal service.
But the most intriguing of the trustees was the fourth, the "fixer" Tim Collins, a close friend of Mr Ahern who worked originally in the tile business. In time, Collins made a fortune from "getting people together" in massive property deals and pocketing a sizeable percentage of the profit. Of all of the St Luke's trustees he was the closest personal friend of Bertie Ahern.
They went back a long, long way. Along with Des Richardson, Tim Collins was a partner in a company called Pilgrim Associates which got a contract from Cert when Bertie Ahern was appointed Minister for Labour. After the company went into liquidation, Mr Collins got involved in various enterprises until he really struck lucky.
At the time, the Government and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews, were interested in acquiring the site of the Battle of the Boyne because of its historical associations with the famous battle between King William and King James which changed the course of Irish and British history.
But in December 1997 the McCann "banana" family who control the fruit importers Fyffes stepped in and acquired the 700-acre site for ?2.7m through a company of theirs called Deep River.
About a month later, in January, 1998 the site was offered to the Government because of its historical significance. An interdepartmental committee met to discuss buying the land from the McCanns in March, 1998.
The OPW got a valuation of between £4m and £7m as the cost of buying the site.
"It was through the Taoiseach's office that we were approached first. They approached informally first and we had a formal meeting with the Taoiseach's office on March 3, 1999," revealed Barry Murphy, chairman of the Office of Public Works.
Less than 18 months after the land was first mentioned to the OPW, it bought Deep River for £7.8m - a tidy profit of £5.1m for the already very wealthy McCann familyin just 18 months and without having to spend a cent onthe deal.
Interestingly enough, the Taoiseach's close friend Tim Collins, who had brokered the deal between the McCann family and the State walked away with a commission of over £600,000 for himself.
Even better, the deal was structured so that the State bought the company Deep River instead of simply buying the land and so the McCanns avoided paying almost £1m in capital gains tax and stamp duty on the profits of the sale. Asked was he directed to purchase this land, Mr Murphy of the Office of Public Works replied: "The correct answer to that is that the Government asked us to."
The three main trustees of St Luke's certainly prospered as part of Bertie's 'golden' inner circle. Like Des Richardson and Joe Burke, Tim Collins was rewarded for his services with a job on a government State agency. He was appointed to the board of An Coras Tractala but he resigned before investigations commenced into his business dealings.
For some people, St Luke's was about romance and being close to the centre of theTaoiseach's world. But for others, it was obviouslya means to make connections and oil the wheels ofcommerce.
Until 12 days ago the man at the centre of it all, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, remained aloof and untouched by the financial dealings of his friends in St Luke's. All that changed when someone (as yet unknown) passed a slim file from the tribunal to the editor of the Irish Times Geraldine Kennedy.
Edited extract from
'Irish Family Feuds' by Liam Collins, published by Mentor Books, in bookshops now.
- Liam Collins
