If a Tree Falls by the Liffey and Nobody Wants to Hear, Does that Mean There are no Trees in the Quays?
The Irish Judicial Oath : ''In the presence of Almighty God I do solemnly and sincerely promise and declare that I will duly and faithfully and to the best of my knowledge and power execute the office of Judge of (whichever court) without fear or favour, affection or ill-will towards any man, and that I will uphold the Constitution and the laws. May God direct and sustain me.''
The only Irish president to resign in order to get a better job was the barrister Mary Robinson. More importantly, Ireland's only (illegal) intervention in another country's democratic process (Italy in 1948) was arranged by the barrister Sean MacBride. More importantly still, the guys who looked after the bankers thirteen years ago were Brian Lenihan (a Senior Counsel) and Peter Sutherland (a Senior Counsel) - not surprising when the head of AIB was Dermot Gleeson (a guess what, who served as Attorney General under the barrister John Bruton). Barristers have a funny habit of turning up in places where democracy, justice and accountability are bypassed. Look at the five named above, how they are remembered, how important they are supposed to be. If they make 'mistakes' they are not the mistakes that mortals make - they are what is left to happen when great minds are battered by fate. It is nonsense. They are just alternative versions of Charles Haughey, whose being one of the brotherhood has largely been written out of history.
One of the most startling rituals for anyone unfamiliar with the High Court to witness is the bringing of prisoners in handcuffs into the inner sanctum to make some kind of application or other. It is a very Victorian humiliation. They are spoken for, then hauled out of it and back to jail. Maybe they succeed sometimes, I doubt it though. They get a few days of hope, maybe. The Judges, lawyers and court officials get another little transfer of funds from the taxpayer.
Rule 2.3 of the code of Conduct of the Bar: ''Barristers must promote and protect fearlessly and by all proper and lawful means their client's best interests and do so without regard to their own interest or to any consequences to themselves or to any other person including fellow members of the legal profession.''
While not an oath and intended solely to give the public impression that barristers are bound to some form of ethical conduct, the above rule is still of interest. What interests me is that it shares with the judicial oath (an extension of) the word 'fear'. It is an acknowledgement that both barristers and judges do not live in a bubble of legal niceties but are sometimes got at, to the extent that they may have reason to be afraid if they do not play ball.
Time to write a letter.
Dear Judges Collins, Faherty and Murray, it is of course impertinent to write to you before you give your long overdue judgment, and even more impertinent to think that you might read my humble blog. But anyway, whatever.
On May 23rd 2019 Cormac O Dulachain SC informed me that I and our company would not get justice. Although he was not specifically named as saying this in my November 18th 2019 affidavit, its being said was not challenged by anyone in court, least of all by Mr. O Dulachain himself. Like everything else that didn't fit the pre-approved narrative, Judge Humphreys did not deem the comment worthy of mention in his judgment. I can only conclude that justice not being done is not considered a problem under certain circumstances in the High Court.
In contrast to those of Messrs. Dully and McCaul, our lawyers (rightly) refuse to do anything for us unless we pay them. In effect, Messrs. Dully and McCaul have an unlimited supply of free legal aid in their bid to defeat what is a small town charity. We can only defend ourselves through borrowing. Our only sources of income, Athlone Town Football Club and Athlone Community Radio, have refused to pay any rent since May 2015. We could have got a court order or two in order to force them to pay up, but we don't behave like that. Garda Dully's greatest ally has been the shock we felt when one of those tenants looked on approvingly as he took us to court, purportedly on behalf of its members. I have often sat and wondered in some dreary courtroom if this was really happening.
You have probably been tipped off that I am a troublemaker. That is the opposite of the truth. I was raised to step back and give professionals the room they need to do their thing. On April 11th 2018 I and we had been model clients - respectfully deferring to the wisdom of counsel, patiently and approvingly responding to our legal team's many promises, always paying their enormous charges on time. On April 12th 2018, as I listened to Richard Humphreys deliver the judgment he had promised on a golf course, I realised that not one of our legal team's promises had materialised. No evidence of the slightest significance had been submitted.
''There are very few vexatious litigants. Most people come into contact with the legal process only once if at all in their lifetime, usually either in the wake of some personal crisis or as a result of a heated dispute in the course of their business. In such circumstances, most potential litigants are acutely vulnerable. They go to law only to win and not to criticize the legal establishment'' - Jonathan Caplan, lawyer (writing in 1977).
When this all kicked off in 2012, we were a little charity minding our own business, doing everything by the book and trying to be fair to everyone. Then came a campaign of interference and intimidation, which I believe to have been orchestrated from FAI headquarters. It was a relief to get into the shelter of your courts, where we expected truth and justice would reign ... lol. It was more like a grifter's paradise. The judiciary ended up rubber stamping the FAI's apparent objective of transferring millions of euro worth of property from (effectively) the people of Athlone to its friends in that town. And it has done everything it possibly can to facilitate the extraction of as much cash as possible from me (via our bankrupt company) for the same lawyers who participated in the rigged case (and others). Speaking to our counsel since the first judgment, one thing is clear. At the same time as they will encourage us to appeal everything, they will not consider any actions which could facilitate our getting the property back. [The only exception to this was of course Mr. O Dulachain's submitting actual evidence prior to the pre-arranged settlement. This was done only on the understanding that the three new deponents would not turn up and their evidence could then be struck out. The fourth new deponent Mr. Temple had to turn up in order to fulfil his part in the pretence of outvoting 97% of the shareholding with Mr. McCaul. And it should be noted that his planned affidavit was replaced by a radically different affidavit that was excellent (though over-technical) but only contained six exhibits, none of any significance. It was a clever set-up but contained two flaws: a ''stupid farmer'' (quoting Mr. Forde) could see through it and the evidence was never challenged by Garda Dully] It is impossible to reach any conclusion other than that the barristers agreed among themselves that, come rain or shine, the barrister John Hayden, his cousin-in-law and friend/frontman would get the property and only pecuniary matters were up for grabs (hence the elongation of the 'fight'). We are now heading towards Year Six of this sham, with no end in sight. The position I find myself in is as a majority shareholder defender of a company whose sole purpose is to protect a publicly funded sports facility for the people of Athlone, hence someone who has no choice but to challenge a legal establishment that is refusing to renege on its private business arrangements. A subject of a military dictatorship would have to accept that his or her property is being stolen by power. I and we are expected to accept not just that theft but the additional monetary theft. Not doing so is likely to land me in Castlerea or Mountjoy, from where I can ponder how lucky I am to live in a democratic republic.
There are no more than three Laws in this world, arguably only two. The Law of the Jungle says that only the dirtiest and most able will survive. It has only ever operated in circumstances where the jungle conditions were imposed on others and is obsolete in the modern world. The Law of the Land says that wrongdoers should be punished. It is aspirational, leaves sufficient wriggle room for well-connected wrongdoers and is not likely to end the crime industry anytime soon. The Law of the Street on the other hand is immutable. It says that stupidity must always be punished. (And yes, I do know about maritime law).
As I walked out of that reading of the First Judgment on April 12th 2018, Garda Dully and his two friends had it in the bag. The property was theirs. The disbelief and confusion I felt was almost certainly leading us into seeing an appeal as hopeless and following our legal team's convincing advice to sue Martin Egan (we would probably have lost the suit, Mr. Egan's daughter being a barrister), from which there could be no way back. But Garda Dully got greedy and decided to cash in on the documents our legal people planted (ultimately) for the second club's benefit on April 9th 2018. That was an easy enough win for them, though they still needed increasingly obvious assistance from across the aisle. But with that won, they needed to sue our directors individually to get the loot. And that meant that I had the right to submit our company's evidence against our legal team's wishes, which was not good news for Garda Dully. He had failed the Law of the Street and that was where his case would naturally be left to unravel. Stupidity must always be punished ... only it wasn't. At every turn Garda Dully has been looked after, but only at the risk of exposing the litigation process to ridicule. Like Howard Beale, they have meddled with the primal forces of nature.
It's not that I don't appreciate Garda Dully's people's (the ''three rogues'' as Mr. O Dulachain called them, before he joined forces with them) achievement in getting the scam this far. But legal scams should not be achievable for amateurs, they should have to be coordinated like bank heists. There were too many amateurish mistakes in this one. Michael Forde needed to throw the defence with a modicum of subtlety. Richard Humphreys should never have agreed to sneak the second club into his first judgment, as if he was the guy moving the three shells at Ballinasloe fair. And like I said, Garda Dully needed to quit while he was ahead. This could be explained, charitably, by it being their first time and not knowing what to do. Less charitably, it could be explained by a complacency bred from their actions never being challenged or even examined. Corruption is easy. Corruption which cannot be traced is difficult. Standing up to corruption is the most difficult thing, people get hurt doing that. Corruption generally gets a free ride from people who purport to get het up about all kind of trending issues. People with character, especially Judges, have to resist it. They can never allow themselves to identify as part of a group.
The remote hearing of your court on November 10th 2020 took a strange turn, in that a lot of time was spent on a kind of hearing of the main appeal - an indication presumably that the main appeal was not expected to happen. Judge Murray took the sole defence point of Michael Forde SC (something about Dully not securing a representative order) and ran with it. Judge Collins went with that for a little while too, but he mainly pushed the Judge Humphreys line. Judge Faherty didn't really participate; she was a late substitute for Judge Costello (who apparently got cold feet about what was unfolding) and didn't appear to be up to speed with the details of the case. Judge Collins made a big fuss about a line in a David Dully affidavit which we had failed to challenge. That was fine on its own terms. But it revealed something which we otherwise could not have known - that Judge Collins had done his job and researched the affidavits. In other words, he had chosen not to mention entire affidavits from Messrs. Burke, Comber, Molloy, O'Farrell and Temple which remain unchallenged, in turn revealing a policy of memory holing anything which could trouble Garda Dully's cause. Philip O'Farrell is our accountant for God's sake. How can he be effectively banned from proceedings? What's that Skip? What kind of court?
The Good Cop/Bad Cop dynamic between Judges Collins and Murray was not much of a novelty for us, more a variation on a theme. Apart from the many and varied barrister conflicts in or around our case, we've had Michael Forde vs. Richard Humphreys, Igors Labuts vs. the FAI, Dragos Sfrijan vs. the FAI, Athlone Town FC vs. the FAI, John Hayden vs. Paddy McCaul - all (with the possible partial exception of the first pair) fake, each assisting in its own way the interlocking interests of Athlone Town AFC Ltd., the FAI and Pre Season. Each one of you is an ex-barrister, I don't need to tell you about these types of games. Working in an essentially British legal system, you should also know about the old British tricks of land acquisition through bogus claims and manipulated contracts (with pre-placed agents, fake promises, threats). This stuff is as old as the hills.
You have a problem now, assuming that you want to award the preliminary appeal to Messrs. Dully and McCaul. Even with our counsel's jaw-dropping attempt to clean up (I was going to call it a retrofit) our evidence to fit the judgment he was employed to challenge (by such as claiming he didn't know anything about our creditors while attempting to disappear all of our creditor evidence i.e. the acknowledgement of one's existence in the First Judgment, Mr. Forde's citing of Mr. O'Farrell's evidence of one during submissions, our exhibition of the Deed of Transfer charge with one) there is still no legal way to bind me or our company to the 'settlement'. The author of the 'settlement' Mr. O Dulachain never claimed that I was on board, our company was not consulted (even if it was, 75% of its shareholders would have to approve the distribution of its assets - not 2% or now 1%), our creditors were not consulted and Mr. McCaul has his own page in the Guinness Book of Records for conflicts of interest. You could do what Judge Humphreys once said, that he was ''not afraid to make new law'' if that was what had to be done to get it over the line. But that wouldn't be a good look for the Court of Appeal, would it? And good luck with getting all of that through the Supreme Court and Strasbourg.
My position is simple. I have a reasonable understanding of why you want John Hayden (a barrister) and the FAI (a repeat customer) to win this one. You have the powers to look after these people if you wish. But you still have contradictory obligations: to truth, justice, common decency. Above all to the judicial oath which sits atop this post. As Cormac O Dulachain SC said to Michael Forde SC on December 4th 2019 (while warning him to stop pretending that they hadn't met at 33 Mountain View Road in the seven days between May 15th and May 23rd 2019), ''So maybe (you want) to think, have a second thought, before this line is pursued''.
What is evident from observance of Dully's presentation is how closely it follows the praxis of State propaganda - a repetition of one warped version of a truth (with the herding of issues into sufficiently narrow parameters from which action can only benefit the aggressor), the censorship of any effective contradiction of this, the smearing and threatening of opposition players, the public spin. It is hard to find a line of demarcation between Dully's ambition and the expression of State power. Considering the extent of corruption in the case, this is remarkable and suggests that the controlling power in Irish society is so much a product of the Haughey era that John Delaney himself could feasibly take on employment as a judge. Not maintaining even a facade of propriety takes the courts back to the bad old days of control from London or Rome. I hope I am wrong, but there is little sign of it.
Cieran Temple warned me in 2014. He said ''You don't know what you're taking on''. I still don't know. Should I? More explicit warnings have occasionally scared me (at least they have already played the planting card) but mostly raise a yawn. All I am doing is standing up for what is right, in accordance with my duty, my conscience and my obligations as a Christian. I will continue to do so until we get justice. If somehow we don't get justice (i.e. our property and money, including the E10,000 cash which Mr. Forde's agent holds, are not returned in full), then things will take a darker turn.
While I have always put our company and the cooperative before my own interests, I still have to avenge the personal attacks on me. The biggest mistake which Garda Dully's people made was having Judge Humphreys officialise that earlier 'truth' I mentioned in his First Judgment, that I was a crook and a liar, and that I should be barred from visiting the stadium. I come from a proud and a proudly honest and a patriotic family. My grandfather had to spend two years in a kind of exile on Iniskeagh North from the British due to his activist love of the Irish language. He was later hounded out of his job by the Catholic Church and its servants for the crime of organising set dances outside the financial control of the former. The Sinn Fein guys who dominate our case probably know all the rebel songs, but if they betray the trust their profession demands of them then they have betrayed the rule of law and are therefore by extension traitors to their country. Richard Humphreys may be an enabler of chancers, but he is also somehow a Judge and that means his judgment still stands as a judgment of my country on me. If we are denied our right to appeal that judgment, then I don't know what will happen but I certainly won't live with it.
What it comes down to from your point of view is whether or not you know that an injustice has been done. I believe that you cannot but know that. You obviously have it in your power as Judges to undo an injustice. The question is: will you use that power or will you continue the game as set out in August 2017? If it is to be the latter, then the least we deserve is a clear explanation of the thinking behind the setting aside of all of our primary evidence, why you either don't accept its authenticity or don't believe that it is important. If this reasoning is persuasive and legally responsible, and if you will do us the courtesy of telling us who or what will actually own the property instead of leaving its ownership in la la land (to be decided by ''nominees of the plaintiff '' and ''Mr Paddy McCaul'' and one other), then we will accept your judgment and move on.
Yours Sincerely, Decky.
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