The planning tribunal isn't pursuing it.

Celia is laughing it off.

And Bertie is sticking to his 'baloney' defence.What a week in politics

THERE is history between Fianna Fail and the Fallon family. On paper, they appear to be blood brothers: one, the founding pater familias of the nation and claimant to its republican identity; the other, synonymous with patriotic self-sacrifice.

The Fallons gave four brothers to the service of the state in the Garda Siochana. One of those brothers, garda Richard Fallon, was the first member of the garda to be posthumously awarded the Scott Medal for bravery after he was shot dead by paramilitary bank robbers in Dublin in 1970.

The legacy of Richard Fallon's death is more than a mere footnote in the history of the Troubles. It has left enduring bad blood between the ruling party and the murdered man's loved ones, who believe the circumstances of his death were covered up in a conspiracy involving senior Fianna Fail politicians at the time.

Whether the then minister for finance was aware of this soured relationship when garda Martin Fallon reported for duty as his substitute driver in 1994 (the minister's previous state car had, to the acute embarrassment of officialdom, been stolen) is unclear. The chances are that he soon would have learned about it, Bertie Ahern being one of those unceremonious politicians who likes to sit in the front passenger seat and chat.

According to former colleagues of the retired garda, Martin Fallon was "a very likeable guy, a sound individual" who had been popular at Store Street station in the north inner city before transferring to driving assignments with the "details" unit in the Phoenix Park.

It is likely that the pair would have discussed Richard Fallon's death as they travelled around the country in those fledgling weeks of the IRA's 1994 ceasefire. Even though it coincided with the Fr Brendan Smyth controversy that culminated in the collapse of Albert Reynolds' government, there would have been renewed impetus to raise the topic as the dead man's widow passed away around this time, in November 1994.

It was said at her graveside that what killed Richard Fallon's wife was a broken heart. Nobody had ever been convicted of her husband's fatal shooting as he chased bank robbers on Arran Quay on 3 April 1970, just months before the Arms Trial got underway. The murder was widely attributed to Saor Eire, a republican splinter group, but the three men who were charged with it were acquitted and there ended the case.

The Fallon family has campaigned for years to have a tribunal of inquiry established to examine the circumstances of Richard's murder. They unearthed evidence in a Department of Justice file that illegal arms consignments linked to the murder were smuggled into the country with the knowledge of some senior Fianna Fail figures, notably Charles Haughey and Niall Blaney, the ministers accused in the Arms Trial. The gun used in the murder was traced back to one of those importations.

The briefcase

Fast-forward to 2000. Martin Fallon, who, in the meantime, had driven both government chief whip Jim Higgins and sports minister Enda Kenny during the Rainbow government, turns up at Leinster House with an extraordinary story. He tells the two Fine Gael politicians that, while acting as Bertie Ahern's temporary driver in 1994, he witnessed the man who is now Taoiseach taking a briefcase full of money to Manchester.

He says he drove Ahern's partner, Ceila Larkin, to a bank in O'Connell Street from which she emerged with the briefcase and that she had left it behind her in the car which was parked overnight at garda headquarters in the Phoenix Park. He says he was instructed the following morning to collect Bertie Ahern in Drumcondra and drive him to Dublin airport, where he watched the minister transit the VIP section to board a flight for Manchester, the briefcase packed with money in his hand.

Jim Higgins subsequently mentions the story to two journalists, Frank Connolly and Jody Corcoran, who resist writing it due to insufficient evidence.

A year later, in May 2001, the minister for justice, John O'Donoghue, informs the Dail that the Department of Justice's papers on Richard Fallon's murder, due to be released under the 30year rule, have been withheld from the National Archives Office on foot of a retention certificate agreed by the Department of the Taoiseach.

By now, the youngest son of the murdered garda's five children, Finian Fallon, an alumnus of Blackrock College and an accountant by profession, has stood unsuccessfully for the PDs in Dublin North for the 1997 general election. The following year, he was the party's candidate in the constituency's by-election created by the resignation of Ray Burke, a former justice minister, precipitated by the planning tribunal.

But his relationship with the PD leadership ran aground in March 2005 when he attended a meeting with the garda commissioner, Noel Conroy, and the minister for justice, Michael McDowell.

At that meeting, the minister definitively refused, on the grounds of cost, to sanction a tribunal to investigate Richard Fallon's death.

When the Bertiegate scandal erupted last autumn, it resurrected memories of what Martin Fallon had told Enda Kenny and Jim Higgins five years earlier. In light of the Taoiseach's admission that he received money from businessmen at a dinner in Manchester while he was minister for finance, both the destination and the date recounted by Fallon added plausibility to his account.

Senior Fine Gael figures, including Enda Kenny, talked about it in Leinster House last September, though it was never raised in the chamber during the highsuspense debates on the payments to Ahern.

At the height of the revelations in the autumn, Jim Higgins . . . by now a senator and an MEP whose intervention on the basis of an anonymous tip-off had kickstarted the Morris tribunal . . .stopped to talk to a journalist on the plinth of Leinster House and recounted Martin Fallon's story about Bertie and the briefcase of cash. Higgins added that Jody Corcoran, a reporter with the Sunday Independent, had sat in Higgins' Leinster House office and listened in on a phone conversation with the retired garda in which he had repeated the story. When contacted about the allegations last October, Corcoran explained that the story had not been pursued because there was not enough evidence to support the allegations.

Martin Fallon was not willing to discuss it with journalists. Six months later, however, that assessment changed significantly.

'Baloney'

Suddenly, last weekend, what had been one of the worst-kept secrets in town in the last six months exploded onto the front pages of the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Independent. A portent of the impending drama came the previous Thursday evening when the garda on duty outside Bertie Ahern's controversial house at Beresford in north Dublin was approached by a young woman. The Taoiseach was not home.

The woman identified herself as a reporter from the Mail on Sunday. She said she had a letter for the Taoiseach.

The garda explained that correspondence normally went to Government Buildings or to the Fianna Fail leader's constituency office at St Luke's in Drumcondra. The reporter insisted that her instructions from her editor were to deliver the letter personally to Ahern, in line with the paper's legal advice. Only after a phone call to a representative of the Mail on Sunday . . . and, allegedly, after tears from the reporter . . . did the garda relent and accept the letter.

While this drama was unfolding, Bertie Ahern was finishing an evening's canvass in his Dublin Central constituency. With the last of the doors knocked on, Ahern and his team retired to Fagan's pub in Drumcondra. The Taoiseach didn't stay long and soon made the short journey to his home adjoining All Hallows college. There, the garda presented him with the letter.

It contained a series of questions about Ahern, his former partner Ceila Larkin, and a briefcase full of cashf With a busy general election campaign about to get underway, government press secretary Mandy Johnston was planning a day off last Friday week.

However, there was little quiet about Johnston's day. Having been made aware of the events at Beresford the previous evening, she contacted the Mail on Sunday to convey her annoyance that the Taoiseach had been contacted at his private residence. The newspaper was told that there were established channels for requesting information and these should be used. That evening, a lawyer from the paper phoned Johnston.

The Mail on Sunday was resisting sending its questions to the government press secretary and insisted they go directly to Ahern. Ahern's denial was sent on Friday evening and, in government circles, there was a sense that the paper was not going to publish the story.

However, as the response was being sent to the Mail on Sunday, it emerged that the Sunday Independent was also investigating the 'cash in a briefcase' allegations. Ahern was canvassing on Friday evening when he was approached by Jody Corcoran, a senior reporter from that paper. The Fianna Fail leader had had plenty of dealings with Corcoran. The two men chatted briefly, the reporter mentioning that he was considering buying a house in the neighbourhood. No officials or press officers were present. The conversation quickly turned to the 1994 allegations. Ahern admitted that he was aware of the allegations but said there was absolutely no truth in them. He dismissed them as "baloney".

Ahern cannot have been surprised about the questions from Connolly and Corcoran. Only a week earlier . . . prior to the Easter holiday weekend . . . another newspaper had contacted Fianna Fail about the same story. Nothing emerged from those queries, however, as the newspaper was not confident about its information.

Deafening silence

Frank Connolly has denied that the story resulted from a Fine Gael smear campaign against the Taoiseach, as alleged by Mary Harney. Enda Kenny has also denied that a senior figure in his party was actively passing the story onto journalists in recent weeks. However, Jim Higgins, breaking his deafening silence since the story was published, seemed to contradict his party leader when, in a radio interview with Matt Cooper, he said a senior party member had passed on the story. Asked again about the matter on Thursday (when it was clear that Fine Gael rather than Ahern was suffering most damage from the publication), Kenny distanced himself from the allegations. "That matter is before the tribunal and it is up to the tribunal to decide what they want to do about it, " the Fine Gael leader said.

Jody Corcoran has been away on holiday in the past week and was unavailable for comment.

In Fianna Fail, the stories in two Sunday newspapers were viewed as an orchestrated attempt to upset the party's publication last Monday of its key general election document on the economy. Louth TD Seamus Kirk chaired the Monday morning press conference. Ahern and finance minister Brian Cowen spoke about Fianna Fail's tax and expenditure plans for the next five years, should the party be returned to power. Questions from the media followed and Ahern was immediately asked about the briefcase allegations. "I'll answer at the end, " he said, a look of displeasure written across his face.

There are no plans by any parties to raise the matter in the Dail when it returns from the Easter holidays next week. Nor does it appear that the planning tribunal intends to pursue it. Martin Fallon has maintained his silence throughout.

In unattributable conversations with politicans since the story broke, it has been repeatedly stressed that the Fallon family was "badly affected" by the murder of Richard Fallon 37 years ago. The intention appears to be to undermine the credibility of his brother's story.

Asked to comment, Finian Fallon, who was aged two when his father was murdered in the line of duty, responded: "I would have no reason to disbelieve my uncle's story. I would be saddened if, as you suggest, there appear to be unattributable, concerted efforts to discount my uncle's story. If this was true, then this would be a continuation of the kind of abuse of political power and cover-up that prevailed at the time that my father was killed, at great human cost."