Bottles and Tin Cans, Briars and Buachalans
''It is extremely difficult to actually discover you're like a eunuch in the harem. You can watch it all but there is fuck all you can do'' - Alan Shatter, ex-Minister for Justice
Athlone Town used to play in the ramshackle St Mel's Park, properly situated, as any football centre should be, in what was not the richest part of town. Boys played on the street, knowing that they could be playing behind the wall for the Town in a few years' time. That vital connection was still there.
Outsiders don't get it, what football can mean to those who need it. It has nothing to do with 'academies' or 'pathways', managers or CEOs. That might be ok for a regimented game like rugby, not for football. Those ideas are really just tricks to distance the game from the people who made it, to turn us into passive consumers of our own recycled imaginations. A boy (and maybe a girl too - I'm not sure) who needs the game feels it in his heart and bones. Mastering control over his body in a team game that rewards individual expression might be the only control he achieves in his life. That is why street players always win when they get an equal chance.
Playing for the Town lifted not just the player but his family and community. Consequently, there was an energy about matches at St. Mel's Park (especially, my father told me, before Athlone became a senior club) that will never be matched at the new stadium.
That energy attracted interest from unlikely sources. Smaller businessmen had always been involved to some extent, as (mostly) equal partners. But the bigger guys, many of whom barely knew the rules of the game, developed an interest and started offering their advice. They knew how to 'progress' the operation.
Soon they were in charge and ordinary people were, as ever, cowed by status, connections and stuff. Actual progress was eventually replaced by pie in the sky. Openness, independence, frugality and merit gave way to secrecy, dependence, debt and cronyism.
The club I grew up supporting, then a candidate of four for oldest league club in the world outside of the UK, the club my relatives played for, is long dead. Debt-ridden, it was euthanised in or around 1989 and, in a patented FAI move (now in use as far away as Glasgow), replaced by a similarly named club. As the old club had been quite successful and historically important, a cult of secrecy built up around the move, to the extent that most of the club's board members didn't know about it and never got to see the new club's constitution.
The downside to the secrecy (for the FAI) was that the new club had, through the necessity of keeping it all quiet, to also be a private members' club. It therefore maintained a good degree of independence from the FAI's governance. But UEFA was turning the screw and the FAI doing their bidding. The locals were told that their stadium was not good enough. In fact, it was an embarrassment.
The FAI approached the new club, or its agents within it, in 1999. It promised to provide an unstated amount of funding for a new stadium, provided that the club transform itself into a limited company and provided that the ownership of St. Mel's Park was moved into a cooperative trust. The trustees of Mel's were to be representatives of the FAI, the club, the local authorities and the local community. The club at this point hired a barrister, a John Hayden BL, for advice. He advised them to form a company limited by guarantee without share capital and to go ahead with the cooperative trust, though he wasn't convinced of any reason to include the local authorities or the local community.
Eventually the club decided to stay a private members' club and to sign its stadium over to Westmeath County Council. It agreed to build a new stadium without maintaining any legal rights over it (i.e. on trust), as the property's ownership would be placed entirely outside of the club. This idea may have originated with the FAI, as the soon to be President of same Paddy McCaul advised that the club couldn't be trusted with large sums of money.
A committee was set up to oversee the building of the new shiny thing. The committee was composed of one solicitor and many of the most prominent Athlone businessmen, including Mr. McCaul. I believe that the businessmen generally acted in good faith (only one of them was paid), but I saw the setting aside of the club as an injustice which I would attempt to right.
[I personally witnessed the class divide between club and company. While attending meetings of both in the Shamrock Lodge Hotel, the former would occasionally have a plate of ham sandwiches put out before them, while the latter always got bowls of a lovely vegetable soup with baps and butter. Things were much more equal (though equally sexist) when our crowd Molloy's was the headquarters of football in Athlone - as long as you got your round in.]
I got that opportunity when the economy crashed. I did well out of that fiasco and decided to do something for my town in return. Football played a big part in the little project. I wanted to restore what had been taken away, and to go further than that.
To my dismay, although fully within its rights to do so, the club rejected my offer of granting it a 25% stake (with a rent reduction of 80% and a E50,000 payment) in our company and it did not seek to use the offer as a basis for further negotiation. It did eventually however agree to transform itself to cooperative ownership and control, in return for a E75,000 loan and the building of an astro turf pitch at the stadium before the start of the 2014 season. The latter agreement was a better one for me personally, as it was better to invest E25,000 more and get it back, and the astro turf pitch would also add to the value of the stadium. It was still disappointing though, as the project was never about me.
Subsequent to the agreement, the club secretary took it on himself to have a number of meetings with the FAI. With or without asking permission of the actual club, the club was pulled from the cooperative project one October 2012 night in the Shamrock Lodge Hotel. The smiling heads of John O'Sullivan and Damien Milton (the only club member to show up) and the considerably less smiley John Hayden were the enthusiastic executioners. As I see it, the refusal to repay the E75,000 would become something of a distraction, an attempt to dupe the club members into showing loyalty to a barrister who had the legal power to conjure a gift/theft from a loan. But the money, any money was never intended for their club. The members thus fell into line and sleepwalked to their own private execution.
It is now clear that it was always the FAI's intention to kill off Athlone Town, so that it could be replaced by a corporatised version of itself which could be sold to investor capital. John Delaney told me as much in June 2017, when he said that he had advised ''them'' to follow what Waterford were doing.
The plan had to be tweaked after I came on board, in order to get the ownership of the stadium out of our hands and back into those of what Delaney called 'the football family'. The transfer of ownership has been considered a fait accompli by the suits since April 2015, when a signing was organised by the usual suspects. The signed document had no legal standing though (certainly not in relation to yet another creditor-dodging new club, the still mysterious Athlone Town Athletic FC), and that is why, following two failed attempts by the FAI to acquire the property without paying for it, the subsequent High Court case had to be rigged.
How it was rigged is well documented here. Some of the highlights (just off the top of my head) were the submitting to court of bogus documents (primarily the club's 'constitution'), the disappearing of three witnesses (including our accountant and the club's previous accountant/treasurer), the shelving of masses of unchallenged evidence from judicial consideration, the shelving of the one significant honest judgment (the sixth) from judicial consideration, an attempt by one barrister to procure a E25,000 cash payment from his client, perjury, two otherwise secret meetings between 'oppositional' players accidentally revealed to the court, pretending to file three affidavits which were never filed, the backdating of another affidavit (witnessed by an 'opposition' solicitor), the forging of a letter of endorsement from our company, the forging of a Commissioner for Oaths's signature, the impersonation of a solicitor towards the (successful) removal of E50,000 from the accountant's office of the Court of Appeal, a suit purportedly made on behalf of one club delivered in judgment on behalf of an entirely different club, another judgment ordering our company to pay a huge sum of money to the 'entirely different club', a settlement made for a shareholding against the wishes of 97% of the shareholders with 2% on unchallenged affidavit as not knowing what was going on, the planting of 15 documents (mostly bank statements not available through discovery) without which there could be no damages case and therefore nothing for Mr. McCaul to settle, the use of one man's hiding behind a limited company to sue a bank for tens of millions of euro as a precedent for holding the directors of a charitable purposes company personally liable for defending their case i.e. without which again there could be nothing for Mr. McCaul to settle, a succession of barristers refusing to mention the most basic points of defence and refusing to submit the most basic pieces of evidence (including our company's constitution), and two instances of judges brazenly claiming 'truths' they knew to be lies.
I know there is an unwritten rule that a rigged case must remain rigged, but this has surely passed the point of being ridiculous. It would be nice to think that there might be a judge or a journalist out there somewhere who thinks the same. Journalism in particular has been shut down on us. The Athlone papers refused to report on the case. The national papers did send one reporter, who was married to a judge (what are the odds?) and who has yet to write a word about what happened. Investigative journalism has become almost extinct over the past forty years, but all we are asking for is simple reportage. Why would that be removed?
The only legal professional to show any disapproval of any of the carry on was Judge Mary Irvine, which is why I go on about her a lot and she probably wishes I wouldn't. But that was four years ago now. The overwhelming response of the legal profession to my raising these issues has been anger, not at the issues but at me for raising them. The overwhelming response of the profession, one to another, has been amusement. They feel that they cannot be touched and that thinking otherwise is silly.
The end result of all these shenanigans, the big picture, is that all the old energy from football in Athlone has been snuffed out and replaced by the most cynical grift. Every piece of meat has been picked from the bones of what used to be senior football in the town. Nearly a hundred years after five Athlone players almost won medals at the Paris Olympics for what is now acknowledged as the first Republic of Ireland team, there is no ambition left. The children of the middle class and higher income working class are being farmed for profit at the new stadium, while struggling working class kids are unwanted if they don't happen to possess enough talent to turn a profit for the directors.
The old stadium lies derelict, not very far but a whole world away from the new one. Briars and buachalans will soon grow where Benetti, Jameson, Laudrup and McGrath once played. St. Mel's Terrace has also been erased - another decision made by people who wouldn't live anywhere near it. It is strange to walk around that part of town and see everything that used to fall under the category of Mel's ... well, see nothing at all, for more than a decade now. That cannot have happened by accident.
We asked Westmeath County Council about buying or renting St. Mel's Park, to at least give Melville FC a chance to bring some of the old energy back. The Council barely bothered to answer us, in correspondence which was headed ''Former St. Mel's Park'' (no longer, it appears, allowed its own name). They just said they had ''plans for this property'' but wouldn't tell us what those plans were.
I had a nice chat with Judge Caroline Costello in the Court of Appeal last month. She was very friendly, which made for a pleasant change. She would clearly like the case to be wrapped up, I assume in accordance with Mr. Hayden's terms.
I would like to think that she is not one of the lads, as women are the best hope of reforming our legal system. I really wish she didn't have the history she has with the convergent interests behind David Dully, Igors Labuts, Paddy McCaul and Dragos Sfrijan. Assuming that Tim Dixon BL's information is correct, I also wish that she declared her (politically unlikely, to say the least) friendship with Cormac O Dulachain SC before requiring us to put up a huge sum of money as security for Mr. O Dulachain's client (who ran a duplicate of the plaintiff's/respondent's case) in order to keep our appeals alive.
Prior to a Bord Bia farm inspection last Tuesday, I had to sign a statement saying that I had no conflict of interests with the inspector. As far as I understand it, to continue the inspection (with or without signing) where there was a conflict of interest would have been a crime. It would be nice if the running of our courts could be outsourced to a body with similar legal standards.
Our solicitor Mr. Cunningham chose to put a motion before Judge Costello's court, applying to be set free from his clients, despite being paid by us (in stark contrast to opposition solicitors who are only ever paid with our money). His big issue appeared to be our refusal to hire a senior counsel. I don't know why seniors always have to be brought in to throw a case, it's not rocket science. Fixing a football match is much more difficult, as everyone in Athlone knows.
Judge Costello gave Mr. Cunningham what he wanted. She didn't ask any questions and didn't allow me to reply to the affidavits. It left us with five weeks to secure a new solicitor, recover our papers (our original solicitor is still refusing to release them), and try to find an honest barrister to lodge submissions in our attempts to contest the main appeal and (for me) to secure an injunction against our ordered participation in the 'settlement'. I didn't bother with the (very expensive) charade. Our barrister, even if starting from a place of honesty, would of course refuse to do any of it - once she got the lowdown/ultimatum from the other barristers.
I told Judge Costello two weeks ago that I had given up on ever finding legal people who would want to win the case, given that many millions of euro depend on our losing it. She said, ''Thank you for the explanation''.
The coward in me would like to be done with them all, to never again have to stand in 'their' courts. But unfortunately, I actually believe in courts and will never give up on justice. Not winning, justice - there is an important distinction. So we'll keep going, and I'll hopefully manage to raise my game to something better than a blog that only lawyers read. Our job now is simple: to make trouble. The scandal is already here, we just need to find a way to get it out there. Then we can apply for a new trial.
It should be acknowledged that our enemies' position is entirely logical. They should, once they have chosen the way of dishonesty, brazen it out. The scam is too far gone at this stage, for it to be rolled back without doing damage to the legal franchise (which is how they see it). Hence, the heat has been turned up - as per Mr. Stapleton's letter below.
Even were Messrs. O'Connor and Hayden to end up taking the property they covet, if we could come away from it all with a scandal that would clean up the conduct of our courts, then the fight would be worthwhile. But I won't pretend that taking a stand against corruption is not a brutal experience. If there was an honest core to our courts, it would be easy. But this is professional Ireland. Corruption is the party that no one wants to end.
The barristers have all the power and influence. All we have is the truth. That makes it an even fight.
John Hayden BL's reported round of golf with Judge Humphreys in the late Summer of 2017 would be a good place to start. In itself, it makes no material difference, because the restraining order and switching of clubs in Richard Humphreys's judgments could only have been included as a personal favour to Mr. Hayden (the plaintiff didn't ask for either favour in court, and an ordinary Garda would have little or no chance of meeting a judge out of court). But finding incontrovertible evidence of that game would make the fraud visible to all, lawyer and layperson alike. We will pay a good reward for that evidence. At this stage, we probably need it.
A private detective, rightly or wrongly, told me that he couldn't investigate the game because of GDPR regulations. It's amazing how the Fates always choose to align with the wicked. Even our sole supporter Tony Connaughton's illness and death fell just right for them. Greek mythology: Clotho spun the thread, Lachesis measured it and Atropos cut the thread of life.
My sources for the golf story range from unconvincing to very good. The former are locals who heard something from someone. The latter is the ex-President of the Prison Officers' Association PJ McEvoy, a man who works with barristers and apparently makes a good living from collecting information on who's doing what with whom. It was Mr. McEvoy who told me about the (still very prominent) judge who asked for (and got) E60,000 in cash in order to tip the scales in the direction desired by that litigant. We're talking about a guy who has probably pulled in more than E4 million of taxpayer money through a number of State jobs, not including massive pension entitlements.
From an Athlone perspective, the game/meeting is reported as a cute hoor move by an on the make barrister. But that doesn't make sense to me. Junior barristers can't gain that kind of access at will, and Mr. Hayden would surely have chosen a judge from his own political party anyway. I think we were looking at it the wrong way. I am now 90% certain that the match was made in Abbotstown, not Athlone.
I am not alone in thinking that the High Court crowd are less than pure. Michael Forde SC, whose company I enjoyed despite everything (as I don't think he qualifies as one of the money-fixated mass of mediocrities clogging up our civil courts, I would like to know why he did it), described a solicitor and senior counsel involved in the case as ''vultures'' and a solicitor who would later get involved as ''a shit''.
Even the IMF, an organisation led by characters like Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Christine Lagarde, both found guilty in criminal courts, could not stomach the way the Irish ran law. They, with the support of the EU and ECB, used the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse to push through with the introduction of regulation to the sector. Brian Cowan's government signed off on the reforms in December 2010 and Alan Shatter inherited the responsibility of making it happen. He appeared serious, if nervous, about doing so.
Then, using a twisted telling of the Maurice McCabe story, which the media gleefully ran with, the barristers knifed Shatter. They charged the taxpayer E126,300 for the privilege, a sum of money which would take someone like me six years to earn. This was the same taxpayer who paid Shatter to introduce the reforms, now being made to pay to stymie them. And to wrap it up in a nice black bow, the same taxpayer was made to pay millions to McCabe (and another whack to the barristers) for the damage done to him by Garda management, which management the taxpayer was also paying only to do their jobs. And in the end, our politicians rolled over and only the bare optics of regulation (the Legal Services Regulatory Authority) was introduced. The LSRA was left wide open to infiltration by the barristers, in accordance with the wishes of innocent craturs like David Barniville.
[I reported one solicitor to the LSRA back in 2020. Even though it accepts that the complaint is serious and the solicitor has not challenged it, we are still waiting on the decision - which, if made earlier, would almost certainly have forced the judges to grant us a new trial. The only useful information that I've managed to get out of the LSRA is that we are complaint number 351 and they are currently dealing with ''approximately 62 complaints'' which were ''made admissible in the 3rd quarter of 2021'', around a year before ours was made admissible. So it looks like four years at best.]
Despite having been both a legal and political insider, Shatter doesn't quite get why what happened to him happened. He has implied that anti-Semitism might be behind it (it isn't). If you stand too close to the elephant, all you see is grey. Shatter has been forced to experience the world that I and several others have to live with: sleepless nights, friends turning their backs on us, warnings not to take the barristers on - all resulting from a cheap opportunistic slur becoming 'fact' only because it dropped from a barrister gob.
It should be pointed out that Shatter has not had anything stolen from him. It was a character assassination for political ends, (im)pure and simple, nothing personal. The character assassination that was done on me was for misdirection, nothing personal (again). We say that guy over there is a crook, therefore we are not crooks for doing exactly what we are accusing him of doing (and more).
Every time I go to court, I see people with their worlds blown apart, desperately trying to pull the legal thing together. Some of them may deserve it and some of them may have been treated fairly by their legal representatives, but they never look like bad people and they never look like respected people to me. The concept of justice might be all they have left to cling to. Unlike Shatter, we don't have a voice which can demand to be heard. We are easily censored by the system. Every court report I hear or read is like a puff piece for that system, nothing like the smirking reality. I wonder how many families are broken up every year, how many suicides caused by the perversion of our justice system.
People tend to find corruption funny, but it is incredibly dangerous, especially when joined to law. Covering for it requires an imposition of judicial power which is always totalitarian. Once corruption gets a grip, it is almost impossible to loosen it from within. The trough is constantly expanded to make room for more snouts. Barbed wire is erected around the farm. And the people are let in one by one; half as agents and honoured guests of the Big Pigs, half as fodder for the trough. Nigeria had a reasonable cut at removing a similar system to Ireland's. Apart from where there were revolutions, which tend to increase judicial power anyway, I don't know of anywhere else that tried.
It doesn't ever make the news, but our citizens' rights as litigants have been systematically eroded over the past five years. In 2018, I could walk into the High Court Central Office and have the complete file for our case handed to me. That was how I learned that an entirely different affidavit was filed in my name on September 20th 2017 to the one that I swore in the High Court on that day. Today, there would be little prospect of discovering this fraud, because access to the office is now by appointment only and only available to the representing solicitor i.e. the one who initiated the fraud or a successor. And as far as I know, access to the complete file is prohibited anyway.
Juries in general are under the cosh and the principle of jury nullification with it - when a jury can refuse to make a decision on the basis of considering a law unjust. The open court transparency principle is under similar pressure. We've had lawyers going to extraordinary lengths to keep the litigants, never mind the public and the press, out of court when something dodgy was going down. We've also had an online (Covid rules) 'appeal' which was farcical - at its best, just barristers talking to each other. On my last two trips to court, Garda Dully's counsel popped up out of nowhere on at least three screens (scaring the bejesus out of me the first time) and the judge was behind so many sheets of glass that she might as well have been a disembodied head in a jar. Beware anything done in the name of progress.
Barristers and ex-barrister judges will of course plead professional integrity and claim that it is disrespectful not to trust them. And why wouldn't they? But litigant rights, like regulation, are based on the notion that barristers should NOT be trusted. Those rights were won in the first place by aristocratic and merchant gentlemen who knew how the world worked, then passed on to the rest of us as part of the general reforming zeal that followed the two world wars. The plebs were never really meant to have these rights. That is why they are being incrementally removed, recently at an alarming pace.
At a hearing of our case in 2018, Judge Humphreys said ''I'm not afraid to make new law''. This was actually a statement of treason, as only elected legislators can make new law in a republic. In fairness, Humphreys did stand for election and did reach a level higher than any of the other 21 lawyers involved in our case. But he still didn't reach as high as, say, Cieran Temple - which is nowhere near legislative level. He may have foiled his St. Michael's College classmate Richard Boyd Barrett's plans for a Caliphate on Ailesbury Road (see below), but that doesn't give him autocratic rights in our country, no more than anyone else.
Humphreys showed his interest in creating law by joining the very influential Law Reform Commission in October 2020. Politicians clearly don't like saying no to its recommendations and apparently around 70% of them make it into law. Humphreys was one of three commissioners appointed on the same day, each for a five year term. Keeping him company was one Judge Maurice Collins, who would aggressively push the Hayden/Humphreys line in the appeal of Humphreys's 'settlement' judgment a month and three days later. Humphreys resigned from the commission in mysterious circumstances, just six months into his term and eight months before the Murray-Collins judgment was excreted.
The resignation may have had nothing to do with us, but it is worth examining. I think it's fair to assume that one of the two non-judges on the Commission would be resigning if the conflict was with either of them, also that the conflict would much more likely be with the prickly Collins than the affable Judge Frank Clarke. Then it is maybe justified to ask the question of why Humphreys would allow himself to fall out with Collins when the latter held the power to ruin the former by delivering an honest judgment. But the perception of conflict, which has been the recurring tactic in so much of our case (most recently seen between Messrs. Cunningham and Stapleton), hides a multitude.
''When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.'' - Judge Montesquieu, quoted by Thomas Jefferson.
Last Friday I went to the Gardai, to finally make a statement against a solicitor which they said I could make more than two years ago. The Garda I dealt with was excellent. Not because he agreed with me (properly, he did not commit in any way) but because he acted professionally. He took the evidence and said he'd get back to me if a crime was committed i.e. if it backed up what I said had happened. He even, unprompted, managed to ask pretty much the key question that not one legal brain could muster in five years: ''What's the (name of the) club that's playing down there now?''
Twenty minutes or less later, he phoned me back, saying that a Sergeant wanted to ask me a few more questions. There followed one of those two versus one dynamics with which I've had to become familiar, albeit the Garda looked very uncomfortable and had almost nothing to say. The Sergeant said they had a problem; two state agencies couldn't investigate the same matter at the same time, so we'd have to wait until the LSRA had dealt with the matter. I didn't believe him, because his eyes didn't match his words, but if he was correct (and if I am correct in my assessment of the LSRA) that means that the barristers have full control not only of their own regulation and depiction in the media, but of their own policing as well. Either way, we now seem to be living in a country where the Taoiseach can be investigated for a crime but a barrister-protected solicitor cannot. Plenty of solicitors have gone to jail in this country, many have had their licences removed but, as far as I'm aware, not one of them was working with barristers at the time.
One thing the Sergeant said shocked me. He said something similar to ''There might be a mental health side to this''. That, I think, is an old turning of the tables trick, often used against people who have been raped by the well connected. Extreme stress is turned to self-doubt and, if successful, emotional collapse. If I'm wrong about his intention, then I apologise. Staying sane in courts that venerate lies and liars, that belittle kindness almost to the point of criminalisation, is actually an achievement.
The Sergeant also said that ''Life is for living'', a thought which is unlikely to ever have been shared with anyone who reported a blue collar crime. He advised me to approach a TD to put pressure on the LSRA. He suggested mediation for some reason (I suggest they pay the rent), said bashfully that he was qualified and laughed when I told him that John Delaney tried to act as a mediator in the past. And he twice said something similar to ''I don't want you to leave here thinking we've fobbed you off.''
I strongly believe that the Garda is a good man who wants to do his job. I was hoping he would phone me during the week, but he didn't. I'd really like to know what are the forces which are winning out against his conscience. Are they the same as those which silenced Judge Irvine? What exactly are the good people afraid of?
Here is the latest communication from his colleague Garda David Dully, via the solicitor Richard Stapleton. Age old extortion tactics: you give us what we want, you get to go about your business; you don't play ball, you get hurt. And like the Sicilian, pre-Nineties New York and most other mafia, they come with their own judges and, crucially, the court connections needed to have them in place as required. Any here-to-stay mafia has to reduce the variables of risk, particularly law enforcement.
And we all thought it was over when they were caught match fixing and money laundering. It seems the King's Inns diplomatic immunity card covers a whole lot more than courtroom activities. Everyone should have one.
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