‘Lenihan DID get that call from Mr Trichet’

MARY O’Rourke has said she believes her nephew, the late Brian Lenihan, did receive a phone call telling him to ‘save your banks’ three days before the 2008 bank guarantee.

Former president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, last week told members of the Banking Inquiry that he never made such a call to the then finance minister.

In 2010 Mr Lenihan told RTÉ: ‘Trichet rang me, and hadn’t been able to get through to me. I was at a racecourse in Co. Kilkenny at a Fianna Fáil event on the Saturday.

‘So I caught up with Mr Trichet’s message the following day which was that: “You must save your banks at all costs.”’

Ms O’Rourke, herself a former Fianna Fáil minister, yesterday backed the l ate Mr Lenihan’s recollection and labelled Mr Trichet as ‘very wily and very clever’.

She also criticised the way in which Mr Trichet answered questions from the Banking Inquiry last week.

‘A schoolboy told to see the master’

He spoke at an event in Kilmainham, Dublin, and answered questions afterwards, insisting the ECB was accountable only to the European Parliament.

Ms O’Rourke told RTÉ Radio yesterday: ‘He said he did not telephone. He may not have telephoned. Somebody acting for him may well have. I believe Brian got a telephone call.’

And speaking about how Mr Trichet did not appear at Leinster House before the inquiry, she said: ‘He did not take an oath. Anyone who goes into Leinster House to the committee has to take an oath and we all know you can’t lie under oath.’

She said that when she saw the set-up of the event, she thought: ‘This is all wrong. The setting was wrong. The idea that you would go like a schoolboy or schoolgirl to be summoned to the master, that was my instant thought.’

She said of Mr Trichet: ‘I thought he was very wily and very clever.’

Now the Banking Inquiry could be set to examine Mr Lenihan’s phone records following the claims made by Mr Trichet.

Last month, Ms O’Rourke said she wanted to put the inquiry ‘on notice’ that she and other members of Mr Lenihan’s family would be keeping a close eye on proceedings.

Ms O’Rourke has said the inquiry without the participation of the late Mr Lenihan is like ‘Hamlet without Hamlet’. She said: ‘Everybody will have their say. That’s what it’s about, finding out the truth that led up to it and all that happened.

‘We just felt that perhaps the Lenihan voice should be heard in some fashion. We instructed our solicitor to write, and he did, and it’s just Conor [Lenihan, Brian’s brother] and myself.’

‘It’s Hamlet without Hamlet, isn’t it,’ she said of the Banking Inquiry.

She also suggested that the Leni- han family may have been told information by Mr Lenihan before his death in June 2011, adding: ‘We may have matters which could be of importance.’