Ireland 2007
Yearbook 2007 Ireland. On January 1, the Irish became one of the EU's 23 official languages. In the early 1990s, Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who was then Finance Minister, received gifts and large loans from friends and business representatives he did not publicly disclose. He maintained that he had made no mistakes, but the trips around his private economy created new tensions within the government coalition in the spring. The Progressive Democrats (PD), sitting in the government along with Ahern's own party Fianna Fáil, demanded before the parliamentary elections on May 24 that he should give a full account of his affairs in the early 1990s, which also happened. The election also meant that his appearance before the Mahon Tribunal, which investigates political corruption during this period, had to be…