Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

It gives me no pleasure to speak to the motion. I entered politics and sought election to this House because I hold firm convictions about the type of country I want Ireland to be. I have many political differences with the Taoiseach and his party because I have a different view of what Irish society can be. I would far rather debate those matters of policy and principle than conduct and character.

I acknowledge the contribution the Taoiseach has made to public life and have no desire or intention of taking any interest in his, or anybody else's, personal affairs. It is the Taoiseach's own actions which made the motion necessary. Let us be clear why he faces a motion of confidence today. One year ago information came into the public domain about his personal finances and transactions being investigated by the Mahon tribunal. He came to the House and offered a strange account of moneys received in Manchester and Dublin. He indicated his firm intention of accounting for himself at the tribunal and appealed for the time and opportunity to do so. No one was more eager than he, he then claimed, for the opportunity to account for himself at the tribunal. He appealed for the sympathy of the nation, claiming these transactions occurred at a difficult time in his life. In large measure he received that sympathy and he was given that time. He was given that time also by the Opposition parties in this House. I note with some irony that he seeks to criticise the fairness he was shown throughout all that period. Last April, when more information appeared, he again said that he would explain all to the tribunal. Throughout the election campaign, he constantly repeated the statement that he would explain all to the tribunal. We gave him that opportunity often in the face of criticism. We gave him the time and we waited for the explanation. However, the explanation is not credible.

We have had four days of evidence at the tribunal and the Taoiseach's story is simply not believable. The Taoiseach came into the House today and read from a script that has not been circulated. He spoke with great authority about many aspects of the matters on which he was questioned at the tribunal. As I sat here listening to it, I was struck by his authority, his conviction, the detail, the way in which he was able to navigate his way around the jungle of fact. I am glad that his memory has recovered because when he was asked questions about these matters last week, he seemed to have a far less good recollection of those events.

It appears that the transactions discussed here last year were only part of a broader picture. The evidence last week focused on no fewer than five transactions involving large amounts of foreign currency in a 13-month period between 1994 and 1995.

It transpires that far from being eager to appear at the tribunal, the Taoiseach was often delaying and frustrating its work. It transpires that the total amount of moneys under discussion in these transactions comes to almost €300,000 in today's terms. These are substantial sums of money for which the Taoiseach cannot credibly account. Therein lies the kernel of the problem, his failure to offer a credible account.

After 18 hours in the witness box, giving sworn testimony, the Taoiseach has not offered a believable account of these transactions. After 18 hours of testimony, over four days, there are few who believe him. I do not believe him. I do not believe many of his own Deputies believe him and the public do not believe him either. I repeat that, after 18 hours of sworn testimony given in front of a panel of three judges, there is still no credible account of transactions involving large sums of money.

The people have a large reserve of common decency. They will insist on fair play and they will give a man time to account for himself. They also have a large reserve of common sense. They do not believe the bizarre and shifting tales that have been offered, of a former Minister for Finance who deals in briefcases full of currency, of men he never met before who suddenly give him cash, of wads of foreign currency, of trips to banks where the clerks do not count the money or at least do not count it in front of one but take it into a back room and produce a piece of paper stating that was what was in the bag in the first place and asking one to sign it.

I do not believe the Taoiseach can tell RTE and the Dáil precisely how much money he received by way of a goodwill loan from each of several named donors in Drumcondra, that he has a signed acknowledgment to that effect from each of them, that he repaid the loans with interest calculated precisely on the figures he says he received and that he can repeat the same story to the tribunal but, when facts and figures have to be checked to see whether they tally with the record, he can now say that in fact neither he nor anyone else ever counted the money and it may have been something quite different.

I do not believe there is any possible explanation for the Taoiseach telling RTE and the Irish people that, at the time he was receiving dig-outs and whip-arounds, his £50,000 in savings was gone. He is happy to tell the tribunal that his partner lodged that £50,000 in cash savings in an account in her own name on 5 December 1994.

I do not believe the Taoiseach can say he is certain he acquired £30,000 in sterling, in order to return it in one lump sum to Michael Wall, without even the vaguest recollection as to which bank he bought it in, whether he bought it in one lump sum or a series of smaller amounts — or even whether he bought it himself or asked a team of others to do so for him. The Taoiseach has always professed to be a man of modest means — he is — and a man of public service, as are most of us in this House. That is why we find it so incredible that if somebody gave one £30,000, one would not remember the circumstances in which one got it, that one would not recall the day one went to a bank to withdraw a sum of money which would have bought one a house at that time. That is simply incredible.

I do not believe anyone, no matter what their line of business, travels overseas with £30,000 in cash, leaves it in a hotel wardrobe while they go out on the town and then delivers that amount to a private couple, for domestic purposes, without any one of the parties being in the slightest bit surprised, thinking anything was otherwise than normal or even bothering to check how much cash was in the bag in the first place.

I do not believe that he cannot tell us the date of the mystery dinner in Manchester, yet he cannot identify anyone who attended the dinner except for one man who is deceased and the man who did not eat the dinner because he was driving the bus. This is from a man who claimed on the "Late Late Show" in 1998 that one of his strengths and best attributes was a good memory. The people have a large reserve of humour, but they will not be taken for fools.

The reality is that the Taoiseach, far from co-operating with the tribunal, delayed it. His statement today was that of course he made discovery. That is not the issue. The matter at the tribunal was not the fact that he made discovery, but whether the discovery included all of the material. We know from the evidence given at the tribunal that an attempt was made by the Taoiseach's lawyers, presumably on his instruction, to limit the time to which discovery was applied to the time that he says he did not have a bank account and that a second attempt was made to limit the discovery to amounts of lodgements and money which were above the amount of lodgements that we know were actually made. The reality is that the Taoiseach has changed and rechanged his story, explaining the explanations in an attempt to explain away what few records exist.

There were many strange things happening in the Irish banking system in the 1980s and 1990s but one thing they did was count the cash at the end of the night and keep records of currency transactions. We can stay here all night and into the morning, poring over the detail of the Taoiseach's finances. That is not the issue. The issue is his failure to offer a credible account of himself and the political consequences that flow from that failure. The issue is that he is not believed. The issue for this House is what do we do when the Taoiseach's sworn evidence, at a tribunal established by this House, is not believed by the Members and not believed by the general public. That goes to the essence of the trust and confidence that is required for a Taoiseach to continue to hold office.

The Constitution gives this House the duty of electing a Taoiseach and of holding him or her to account. We cannot shirk that duty and we cannot subcontract it out to any tribunal. It is for each of the 166 Deputies to discharge that public duty in this public forum.

It is the function of the tribunal to investigate the facts and to report, but it is the duty of this House to decide who should and should not be Taoiseach. Those who are suggesting that we should leave it to the tribunal are playing for time. They are at best seeking to postpone for their own political convenience the decisions which we are constitutionally obliged to make. They are seeking to contract out to three tribunal judges the political judgment which Members of this House are obliged to exercise.

How can we have a situation where the leader of a Government has given 18 hours of sworn evidence in front of three judges which the people do not believe? How can we have a situation where the Taoiseach's credibility has been shredded and where his word is not believed? How can we have a situation where the leader of a Government is known to have taken large sums of money from a person or persons unknown — unknown because he cannot say credibly from where the money came? Apparently, he no longer remembers.

As the Taoiseach said in this House during the debate on the McCracken report, "The tribunal stresses a point I have repeatedly emphasised, that public representatives must not be under a personal financial obligation to anyone." How can we have a situation where the Taoiseach's motives are at least open to question because he received large sums of money for which he will not account? Was Mr. Wall just a friend in need and an admirer, or the owner of a bus company offering bus services in the liberalised UK market when liberalisation of the Irish bus market was under active consideration by the Government? I do not know and I cannot know because the Taoiseach has failed to offer a believable account.

The Taoiseach claims that the only issue on which he should be answerable to the tribunal is the allegation that he received money from Owen O'Callaghan. That is not so. The Taoiseach himself, speaking in the Dáil in 1997, said: "The Government considers that following the money trail is the most efficient and effective way to progress this type of inquiry as witnessed by the great success of the Dunnes payments tribunal which adopted this approach." If a tribunal is to investigate an allegation of corruption it must follow the money trail and the person being investigated must offer a credible account of where large sums of money have come from.

No doubt Government Deputies of all parties, will come into the House and say that none of this matters, that the Taoiseach is a public servant, that he does not have a lavish lifestyle and that what they claim are his successes in Government mean that his financial dealings should be ignored. I do not dispute that he had achievements or his record of public service. However, neither do I accept that these provide a blanket dispensation from the requirements imposed on holders of public office.

John Adams, the second president of the United States, said: "A free people has an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the character and conduct of our leaders." This State was founded by men and women who knew the meaning of public service. In the turbulent times that gave birth to an independent Ireland, the founders of the State knew privation of all kinds. That first generation, which built the State, was driven by the ethic of public service. It embraced the principle, developed across Europe in the 19th century that true democracy requires true public service. It requires that people in public life will act in the public interest. If we are to have Government of the people by the people, then the people must know that those who exercise power do so entirely for the people and not on behalf of any private interest.

The people who founded this State, many of whose heirs are still Members of this House, knew and understood that principle. However, when that generation retired, a new and less savoury element entered Irish politics. The men in mohair suits contained within their ranks those who saw public life as a route to private gain. The great principles of civic republicanism, where the republic is governed in the interests of all the people, were eroded. The culture of public service was polluted by a culture of greed. I am not just referring to the people who we now know took money. I am also referring to those who turned a blind eye.

The Taoiseach enunciated the doctrine of the blind eye, when he spoke at the funeral of his late leader, former Deputy Haughey. His theory is that the normal standards do not apply to the special few. However, the basis of a democracy is that there is no special few. Instead, the obligations imposed on those in public life are rightly greater than on private citizens. What is the motivation behind that eulogy and what of the motivation of other Ministers? Why have so many senior Ministers, who must know that the Taoiseach's account is not credible, continued to defend the indefensible?

This debate is not just about the money that one man was given or why. There is a great principle at stake here: the principle on which democratic governance in a free society is founded. I had understood that the Progressive Democrats were founded on those principles. I had understood that democracy mattered to the Green Party. I read with incredulity the interview that Deputy Cuffe, my constituency colleague, gave to a morning newspaper this morning in which he stated that there was no point in the Green Party pursuing this matter because Fianna Fáil would not listen to it. While I know that certain compromises must be made by a smaller party in a coalition government, I had not expected that the Greens would have turned yellow quite so quickly.

Where now are the fulminations of the Green Party Deputies about corruption in Fianna Fáil that we heard with such regularity in the last Dáil? Deputies Sargent and Gormley were particularly prone to exciting themselves on this issue. During the general election campaign the Green Party frequently repeated its determination to clean up politics. None of that, it would appear, matters today. It cannot but be a source of deep regret to those of us who support progressive politics and standards in public life that the Green Party should have sold out so comprehensively and so quickly.

However, they cannot hide — neither the Green Party, nor the Progressive Democrats, nor those in Fianna Fáil who adhere to the principles of the founders of their party. Deputies in those parties cannot hide behind the tribunal and must take responsibility for assessing the suitability of the Taoiseach to remain in office. Deputies cannot hide behind the ideal that these are the private affairs of a private man. The credibility of the Taoiseach is a matter of public importance. They cannot hide behind his record — we all acknowledge his record. However, there are records in the Allied Irish Bank for which he cannot account and so his credibility is shredded. They cannot hide either from the scrutiny of people beyond these shores, who will look at how we, the elected representatives of the people of Ireland, deal with this matter. In a global economy they will look to the standards of probity that are applied here today and form their own conclusions.

Members of this House, and in particular of the Government parties, cannot delude themselves. There is a duty to act. Sooner or later they all will act. Yesterday I was struck by a comment by one of the Taoiseach's defenders that Fianna Fáil does not do resignations.

See this speech in context