{"id":476,"date":"2007-05-28T17:47:46","date_gmt":"2007-05-28T17:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/05\/28\/bureau-de-change\/"},"modified":"2007-05-29T09:38:56","modified_gmt":"2007-05-29T09:38:56","slug":"bureau-de-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2007\/05\/28\/bureau-de-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Bureau De Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of the three blogs written by political correspondents of Irish papers, Harry McGee\u2019s Inside Politics<\/a> is my favourite. He gives the sense of going a little deeper than he does in his newspaper pieces, which is surely the whole point of journalist\u2019s blogs. He also writes long and often, making Inside Politics vital reading over the course of the last month or so, when the likes of myself needed a regular fix of campaign news. He wrote something a few weeks ago though that struck me as odd at the time, and which I think is worth revisiting in the light of today\u2019s tribunal news.<\/p>\n

On 14th May, discussing<\/a> Bertie Ahern\u2019s statement regarding his finances, made at the request of Michael McDowell, he says:<\/p>\n

“The one thing that he does nail on the head is the alleged dollar lodgment. The Tribunal lawyers said that the \u00a328,772.90 that Celia Larkin lodged (this was the \u00a330,000 sterling that he says Michael Wall gave him for renovation and for stamp duty) represented the exact sum he would have received that day if he tendered $45,000.<\/p>\n

But in his statement yesterday, he said it actually equated to $44,277.68 at the appropriate AIB rate. Either he\u2019s wrong or the Tribunal is wrong. And if the Tribunal is wrong, it\u2019s a fundamental error, especially as it knew that this allegation would be made public before the hearing began. That one has been knocked on the head.”<\/em><\/p>\n

It seemed to me that Bertie\u2019s statement had singularly failed<\/em> to knock the foreign exchange issue on the head. As Harry pointed out, either Bertie is wrong or the tribunal is wrong. Could it have been all that hard to find out which? Until we knew for sure that Bertie was right, surely there remained questions to be asked of him? Why Harry, having identified this issue, did not pursue it is his own business. But I would have hoped that somebody <\/em>could have chased it up. In the end, even Michael McDowell, who only days before was horrified by the issue, decided to let it lie.<\/p>\n

And now here we are a few days after the election and tribunal counsel are still absolutely certain that the relevant sum lodged into Ahern\u2019s account equated to $40,000 and not \u00a330,000stg. This is not a matter of arcane knowledge. The rates of exchange of Sterling and Dollars to the Irish pound on that day are a matter of record. A mere few seconds of googling found me this<\/a>, and while I\u2019m sure records regarding the old Punt are harder to come by, they have to be out there somewhere. Doing the sum is not the most difficult mathematical exercise in the world either. Why was this issue left to die by the press, only to be revisited today? What if it turns out that the Tribunal counsel are right and Bertie was wrong? This, a failure to engage in very basic fact-checking of statements made by a major public figure seeking re-election, must surely amount to a significant abdication of responsibility by the press. To respond that people were fed up of Bertiegate, and that all the negative attention was actually helping him is to miss the point. It may well be that to have pursued the matter would have pushed the Fianna Fail vote even higher. So be it. Burying stories in order to damage a politician is just as bad as burying them in order to protect him. The facts of the story remain resolutely unchased as of today. Perhaps an enterprising reader with a little financial know-how might wish to have a go at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Harry pointed out, either Bertie is wrong or the tribunal is wrong. Could it have been all that hard to find out which? Until we knew for sure that Bertie was right, surely there remained questions to be asked of him?","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[662],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}