Vote of confidence in Perry is a sure sign of the high jump!

I will be surprised if John Perry is still a Minister of State when the Dáil resumes on September 18.

While all the public pronouncements of Government Ministers – including Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore – have pledged unstinting support, the tide has definitely turned against him.

Ministerial colleagues say privately that things don’t look too well for him… the controversy surrounding his personal debts are beginning to look like a “running sore” as one put it.

It’s like the chairman of an English Premier League club releasing a statement saying he has full confidence in the manager. Once that is issued, you be sure that as sure as night follows day that the manager is a goner.

Perry’s difficulty is that the crisis he has found himself in just can’t be explained away… well not in an easy way at the least. He obviously over-invested during the boom years and now the chickens are coming home to roost.

The reasons he got so much support when the judgement in favour of Danske Bank emerged was that he was not alone in his predicament. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of small to medium business people like Perry who expanded too much during the good years, over extended themselves, but are now paying the price.

That outpouring of sympathy from colleagues, including virtually all ministers, was in response to that. “It seemed like a plain vanilla business failure when first reported. Admittedly, more had come out since then which I didn’t know about,” said a minister to me in a text.

The first was that Perry owed the taxman a lot of money (€125,000) when he became Minister and it took a while (including a loan from a bank) for him to resolve that situation. So the first bit of explaining he will have to do is when and how he got a clean bill of health form the tax authorities and to ensure the public that he has no current issue with the Revenue Commissioners. He will have a bit of clarifying to do on that front.

Secondly, if Perry was Minister of State for, say, Housing, he would have no difficulties whatsoever. But he was Minister of State for Small Business. If you were to do a Venn diagram depicting Perry’s ministerial and business interests there would be a considerable overlap.

Back in April Perry as Minister was calling in the chief executives of Bank of Ireland and AIB, essentially asking them to explain their positions and policies on small and medium business, including those with distressed loans.

The Court papers showed that at around the same time Perry was telling Danske Bank that he knew Richie Boucher personally and was talking to the AIB at a senior level.

You can talk until the cows come home about Chinese walls but it gives rise to a perception of conflicts of interest. The court documents also show that Perry has other substantial loans.

All of this needs explaining and a lot of it. And once you get to that level of explanation you are in real difficulty – especially when your personal and ministerial interests are so intertwined – was he speaking to the head of the bank as a junior minister or as an individual seeking a loan or a rescheduling of debt?

This is an edited version of Harry McGee’s column. For the full version see this week’s Tribune here