EVERYONE, including the proverbial dogs in the street, had long-held suspicions about Charles Haughey’s dodgy wealth — but only a few people could be bothered to read the final proof.
New figures show that a little more than 1,000 copies of last year’s landmark report by the Moriarty Tribunal into the source of Haughey’s millions was sold.
In an irony that Haughey himself would presumably appreciate, the report has proved a loss-maker.
Revenue from sales of the report is less than €6,000, while the total printing cost came to €65,698.
According to the Government Publications Office, a total of 1,019 copies of the weighty 678-page report were sold up to the end of February, despite its subsidised cover price of €5.
A further 149 copies of the report were sold in its CD-ROM version.
It seems most people were already too familiar with the details of how the former Fianna Fáil leader acquired £9.1 million — an amount equivalent to €45m in today’s terms — from wealthy businessmen, including former supermarket tycoon, Ben Dunne.
Despite the poor sales figures, the Moriarty Tribunal confirmed that it had ordered a second print run of 3,000 copies after it experienced heavy demand for the initial print run of 1,500 copies, which included free copies for affected parties, their legal teams and journalists.
No Irish language version of the Moriarty Report was printed as tribunals of inquiry are exempt from the Official Languages Act 2003, which requires State bodies to publish copies of all official reports as Gaeilge.
“There hasn’t even been one inquiry about an Irish language edition,” said one tribunal source.
The poor sales figures for the Moriarty Report on the late Taoiseach’s finances contrast sharply with the 2002 report by the rival Planning Tribunal.
The report by the inquiry’s former chairman, Mr Justice Feargus Flood, into the ill-gotten wealth of Haughey’s political sidekick, Ray Burke, entered the Irish book charts with sales of almost 25,000 copies.
A total of 22,823 hard copies of the report plus an additional 1,995 copies of the CD-ROM version have been sold to date.
The price of the report was deliberately fixed at €1 in order to make it as widely accessible as possible.
Studies and reports issued by the Government Publications Office rarely make it onto the list of best-sellers as they are normally only sold through the GPO outlet on Dublin’s Molesworth Street.
Irish Examiner
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