Scamdal

How we are played, in five easy lessons 

1. PEE

''The Judges will decide/ The likes of me provide ...'' - Agnetha Faltskog

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    Every good scandal, and every profitable tribunal, needs a foundational event. A happy circumstance which grabs the attention of the public and guides it into a holding centre where its mind is blown and pockets emptied.                                                                                                                                            

    The Moriarty Tribunal had a coked up Ben Dunne on a penthouse window ledge in Florida, with a prostitute looking out at him and Bono looking up at him. The Flood/Mahon Tribunal had us all looking up, mouths agape, at the slightly less rock 'n' roll figure of Padraig Flynn. His 1999 Late Late Show interview and the reaction to it went something like this. The interview was certainly a blast, which still manages to fascinate (Imparter's 2020 YouTube video has had 2 million views to date), but it didn't come cheap. It would cost the Irish taxpayer a quarter of a billion euro. 

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     It has often been suggested that Flynn was set up to make a fool of himself, with Gay Byrne yielding just the right amount of rope. Byrne had some form in this regard and often used a plant in the audience to turn an interview in an unexpected direction. 

      The lip licking audience questioner in Flynn's case was the journalist Barry O'Halloran, who is today a senior business reporter with the Irish Times. In 2004, Byrne described O'Halloran as ''Will's friend''. Will was Will Hanafin, (as per Byrne) ''our researcher on the case at that time'' and (as per Wikipedia - assuming it is the same Will Hanafin) a barrister. Byrne was at pains to refute any notion that there was ''a deep, dark conspiracy involving myself, acting producer on the night Cilian Fennell and Will Hanafin ... (to) set about the undoing of the life and career of Pee Flynn''.

      Hanafin wrote in 2004 that ''The structure of the interview was carefully planned between'' those same three men. Hanafin had flown to Brussels the previous Saturday for a meeting with Flynn which lasted more than two hours. It was never going to be an ordinary political interview. 

      Flynn's repeating of ''didn't work out for him'' when talking about Tom Gilmartin was more indicative of someone trying to remember his lines than the loose cannon speaking off the cuff of modern legend. The Irish language terminologist Donncha O Cronin had an interesting assessment: (in my best translation) ''But then when he said Gilmartin and his wife were not well, the story was told as if he was trying to plant something in our minds. It was very clever''.

 

     Here is Byrne again: '' For some reason I cannot account for, I was passing through reception when he arrived at the studio. So I was there to meet him. This was most unusual, and I can only think it was because he arrived very early, before 9pm''. And again: ''During the interview, I knew he was in trouble when he dismissed Tom Gilmartin as being unwell ... but of course I had no idea that Tom was watching the show at home in Luton (on Tara Television), and neither had Pee any idea of that. I'm quite certain the notion never crossed his mind''. 

      Byrne, who later claimed that Gilmartin had contacted the show, had apparently forgotten that near the end of the show he read out a 'clarification', saying ''Padraig Flynn just gave us a shout and he made a mistake, he said, during the interview ... Tom Gilmartin is not sick and, as far as Pee Flynn knows, he was never seriously sick ... and if Tom Gilmartin is watching, we're very sorry, apologise for that''. To top it off, the camera cut to the audience where O'Halloran and a green-shirted man (Fennell by any chance?) demonstrated a peculiar and almost synchronised turn from amusement to what appeared to be some dark foreboding. 

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    The Tribunal was set up after James Gogarty, a onetime Garda later turned executive of the construction firm JMSE, came forward with ironclad information about corrupt payments to the government minister Ray Burke. This followed £10,000 being put up for information leading to a conviction over planning matters in 1995 by Michael Smith and Colm Mac Eochaidh. Smith and MacEochaidh were both barristers; one would become a campaigning journalist, the other a High Court judge. The journalist Frank Connolly met with Gogarty and wrote up the story, and the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern announced the setting up of a tribunal of inquiry. 

  

   The Tribunal's scope was limited in those early days. It needed a bigger, wilder witness to both take the heat off Burke and turn it into the gargantuan trough which would feed so many little piggies. 

    The Tribunal's barristers had indirectly approached Gilmartin a year before the Late Late Show interview, when a priest friend of one of them was sent to meet him in Luton. A guarantee of immunity against prosecution tempted him and he did write an affidavit, but threatening phone calls and his fear that any inquiry would be a cover up won out. It wasn't until after the Late Late Show that he finally succumbed to the barristers' advances. Injured pride apparently did the job.

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  Gilmartin was a successful engineer and developer in the UK who decided to return to Ireland in 1987, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Patriotism is claimed and a sentimental story about Gilmartin being sufficiently moved by a homeless emigrant to come home has been offered. But this was big and shady business, driven by the courting of national and especially local government officials. Gilmartin may have been isolated in the end, but early on he was a pretty big deal and not short of connections. Prominent among these was the Environment Minister Padraig Flynn, whom he considered a trusted friend.

 

   Gilmartin was confident. Massive projects such as Quarryvale (later called 'Liffey Valley') looked like they would go ahead. He tended to put instinct ahead of limited company protection, trusting that county development plans and such would bend accordingly. 

 

   While his great rival Owen O'Callaghan would build a grand shopping centre on top of a dump in Athlone - causing one shop assistant to report an earthquake he didn't know had been caused by the build-up of trapped gases there - the noxious gases that surrounded Gilmartin were entirely above ground. Guys came at him from all angles, threatening to make his life impossible if he didn't pay up. Gilmartin (or Arlington Securities, a company he managed but never fully controlled) made payments to Liam Lawlor TD for 'consultancy' - £3,500 a month for around 11 months. Lawlor was a local big cheese who happened also to be a member of Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission (whose European division was then chaired by the Irish senior counsel Peter Sutherland). 

 

    Gilmartin also handed over £50,000 to Padraig Flynn for, he would later claim, Fianna Fail (the Tribunal endorsed this claim). The £50k was processed by the AIB in Castlebar and lodged at a non-resident joint account held by Flynn and his wife, using a bogus address in London.  

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   The journalist Vincent Browne is known to have a passion for truth and justice, which has survived his also being a (non-practicing) barrister (though his Magill magazine did very little to expose this carry-on). In 2007, Browne reported that ''a person connected with the tribunal'' advised Gilmartin to change his evidence so that Flynn could not be put on the hook for having taken a bribe. Browne appeared to have known who the advisor was but could not say. 

   [ If my own experience of how court barristers operate is anything to go by, the advice would have been discussed and agreed among them, regardless of which side any of them were on, in advance of its being offered to Gilmartin. Under no circumstances would one barrister interfere with the normal course of proceedings in a way which could damage the financial or political interests of his fellows. The corollary of this is that when a barrister does so interfere with proceedings, it is always done to benefit the financial or political interests of his fellows]

 

   The official story became, not Gilmartin giving Flynn a cheque for £50K but Gilmartin giving Fianna Fail a cheque for E50k and leaving it to (party treasurer) Flynn with the 'Payee' left blank. Unless Fianna Fail made an issue of 'its' money being stolen - and it has not done anything to date - Flynn could not be considered guilty of any crime. What is certain is that Gilmartin would not have agreed to perjure himself (both stories cannot be correct) unless at least one lawyer of high status told him he would be fine. The entire Tribunal would have had to have understood what was happening in this regard.

 

    One report claimed that the cheque was payable to cash, which seems unlikely.  Did anyone at the Tribunal ever ask to examine the cheque? If not, then that would be consistent with the non-reaction to Bertie Ahern's amusing claim not to have had a bank account for more than five years while he was a minister and his further claim that sterling lodgements later made to one of his accounts by his secretary were from money he made on the horses (described by Leo Varadkar as ''a defence for drug dealers and pimps''). No attempt has been made to check the claims against the records of Irish and British banks or with Ahern's bookmaker(s). 

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     At the Tribunal, Gilmartin often risked undermining his own credibility with a lot of second hand evidence and a tendency to change the year he was told this or that. There were entertaining but generally uncorroborated accusations that the likes of Albert Reynolds and Micheal Martin had been paid six figure sums (not much more than £80k claimed for Bertie, sadly, though the Tribunal did say that he lied about £165,000 in total) by Owen O'Callaghan. O'Callaghan also acknowledged that he made some contribution to Martin. 

    Gilmartin had a tendency to talk a little too much and get tetchy when some of his evidence was undermined. This must have brought a smile to those barristers who wanted to expand the proceedings without harming any of the golden circle. In the early days of the Tribunal, it had appeared that they (and the media) wanted to humiliate Gilmartin, who left school at 13. As time went on, they did give him his due. It would be nice to think that he won them over, but it is never like that. 

 

   Apart from with Lawlor (in a limited way) and with Flynn/Fianna Fail, Gilmartin stood strong against further extortion attempts - most aggressively from Lawlor and Dublin County Manager George Redmond. He went to the Gardai when it became too much to handle, but their investigation was perfunctory. He received a phone call from someone claiming to be a Garda Burns (or Byrnes), who told him to stop making accusations and ''fuck off back to England''. According to Frank Connolly, Gilmartin's biographer, ''It was Ray Burke who ended with the police report on his desk and it was never seen again until ... the Tribunal discovered Tom Gilmartin in 1998'' - suggesting a direct connection between Burke and the barristers who were investigating him.

     The persecution (or normal business between big boys, as could be argued) extended to other powerful institutions, such as AIB. Gilmartin had borrowed E8.5 million from the bank in 1990, something that doesn't sit well with his claimed outsider status. Things didn't go to plan. He defaulted on the loan and it would be called in a year later. AIB, which was chaired at the time by Peter Sutherland SC, used Gilmartin's difficulties to put his company Barkhill Ltd. in the control of its client Owen O'Callaghan. O'Callaghan used Barkhill to make large payments to politicians for rezoning via his fellow AIB client Shefran Ltd., a company run by Frank Dunlop. It should also be remembered that AIB wrote off most of a massive debt owed to it by the Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey.

  

    Gilmartin was turned in to the Inland Revenue in Britain with, according to Gilmartin's son, false information supplied from Dublin. The information was simultaneously fed to the media. He did owe the Inland Revenue a much smaller but still substantial sum from his earlier business activities in England. A British court declared him bankrupt and his family lived off handouts for a period. But he managed to get out of the worst of his financial troubles with legal action and sale of his remaining stake in Barkhill. 

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    The Tribunal settled down into a nice and profitable rhythm once it had been decided to give Gilmartin a fair hearing. Liam Lawlor became the officially designated villain and on one occasion was driven from Mountjoy in a Garda van to get a ritualistic dressing down in the Dail. His refusal to cooperate with the Tribunal got him imprisoned on three occasions, in conditions of maximum media publicity. Unlike Enoch Burke, he was never asked to purge his contempt and only spent a total of six weeks behind bars.

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    The most notorious part of Gilmartin's evidence concerned what happened immediately after he met with the Taoiseach Haughey and eight male members of the cabinet in Leinster House in February 1989.  Of those members, Brian Lenihan had died and Albert Reynolds was excused from giving evidence because of Alzheimer's, but none of the others admitted to remembering the meeting having taken place. Only Education Minister Mary O'Rourke, who was invited on the day by Flynn to pop in and say hello, supported Gilmartin's evidence (O'Rourke had some experience herself of getting on the wrong side of O'Callaghan and friends). At the meeting, Haughey assured Gilmartin that no obstacles would be put in his way. 

    In a story which would not be part of the Garda report, Gilmartin claimed that on leaving the meeting, he was immediately approached by a small man with salt and pepper hair (i.e. someone who probably failed to match the appearance of any single cabal member), who gave him a piece of paper with the IBAN of a bank account in the Isle of Man on it. He was told that he would have no more problems, provided that he deposited £5 million in the account. 

 

   Banking services in the Isle of Man were popular at the time. Ray Burke and Dublin County Manager George Redmond both had accounts there. It is surely reasonable to assume that at least one of Lawlor's 110 bank accounts was also in the Isle of Man, though I haven't seen confirmation of this. 

   Such an enormous sum of money undoubtedly would have gone into a company account, from which it could be distributed in accordance with the wishes of its directors. But there has never been any indication that such a company existed or that the boys ever achieved the status of a truly organised crime gang. Which is not to say for sure that it didn't or they didn't.

     Gilmartin's inability to identify the short man or produce the piece of paper (did anyone ask for this?) does cast doubt on his story. The hearsay evidence (purportedly the original version of Gilmartin's story) of Dublin City Manager Frank Feely didn't help its credibility either. Feely claimed Gilmartin had told him the £5 million man was Liam Lawlor, who was a very big man with greying brown hair. The double effect of Feely's evidence was to both corroborate Gilmartin's adherence to the story over the passage of time and undermine it to the extent that it could never be confidently prosecuted.

     The importance of the E5 million story to the cabal was that it made a series of smaller crimes of corruption seem insignificant by comparison. The challenge facing it was to keep the story centre stage while leaving it hanging by a legal thread. Such challenges are music to the ears of the Irish barrister - 'Hold my Chablis'.  

      Gilmartin's story also fed into the cabal's self-image as streetwise hustlers, with a bit of danger about them, hardchaws who later acquired a taste for the finer things in life. This is not a very unusual fantasy for college-educated guys with solid middle class upbringings and a liking for 'The Godfather' to have, but a huge amount of people continue to buy into it. Salt-N-Pepa man's ''You could fucking wind up in the Liffey for saying things like that'' would surely have sounded a lot more impressive if they'd ever actually killed someone. I don't believe they ever evolved beyond being a free association of chancers wholly dependent on the law for their protection.  

 

    Just because the Tribunal and the media made the most of Gilmartin's colourful tale doesn't mean we should automatically accept that it happened.

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    Liam Lawlor left the stage in a 2005 car crash, which took place just outside Moscow. His driver Ruslan Suliamanov also died. But his Prague-based interpreter Julia Kushnir survived without serious injury. In a peculiarly Irish twist, the barristers would grant Ms. Kushnir half a million euro (for once, not from the public purse) after she sued five newspapers for their inexplicably running with a made-up story about the survivor being a teenage Russian prostitute. 

    Avenues other than death were found to get other senior politicians off the hook. As arranged, Flynn's £50k was deemed inappropriate, not corrupt. That corrupt payments were made to Ahern was accepted but also termed unproven (his resignation as Taoiseach gave the Tribunal brownie points and left Brian Cowen with the job of dealing with the flak from the coming financial collapse and a bank bailout which, like almost everything else that goes south in this country, was a private arrangement among senior counsel). Burke did four and a half months in Arbour Hill, not for corruption but for tax evasion. The middleman Dunlop got a law degree and then did fourteen months in Arbour Hill for corruption. A panicked Redmond was arrested coming back from the Isle of Man carrying around £287k in cash and cheques. He eventually did eight months in Cloverhill for taking one relatively small bribe. And an oddly combined trial involving Lawlor's business partner Jim Kennedy and four county councillors (including Liam Cosgrave Jr.) 'collapsed' in GUBU-like circumstances, mostly due to Dunlop's dicky ticker.                

     Redmond remains the only issuer or receiver of a bribe to be imprisoned for that specific offence (and the jury's 10-2 guilty verdict was not what the lawyers were expecting after one of the two main witnesses refused to testify and the other imploded under cross-examination). Had the barristers chosen to go further, they might have risked some of their number being fingered under Dail privilege for not dissimilar activities in our civil courts. It is a dance of mutual convenience.

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    The final report by Judge Mahon in 2012 reads in part like a confession, or a declaration of judicial indifference. He made some mildly useful suggestions on how politicians might be regulated, but he gave the worst of them the priceless gift of the past tense: ''It (corruption) continued because nobody was prepared to do enough to stop it. This is perhaps inevitable when corruption ceases to become an isolated event and becomes so entrenched that it is transformed into an acknowledged way of doing business. Specifically, because corruption affected every area of Irish political life, those with the power to stop it were frequently implicated in it''.

      No real issue was made of the mountain of lies that were told to the Tribunal. The brazen crimes of deceit that were being committed under the judges' noses might just as well have been a variation on 'Who took the cookie from the cookie jar?''

                                                           

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    The Mahon Tribunal announced in 2004 that it would seek to avoid investigating certain matters at its discretion, in order to save time and money and such, so that it would be winding up around 2007 rather than 2014. The government supported it on this matter. This left the Tribunal wide open to suspicions of cronyism and secret dealing, the very things it was purporting to investigate. 

    When 2007 came, the senior counsel and Minister for Justice Michael McDowell (who himself had purported to negotiate tribunal fees in a downward direction on behalf of the State when he was Attorney General in 2000-1) suggested that the Tribunal would cost a billion euro. Mahon stepped in and assured the public that it would only cost E300 million. People from Ballyshannon to Ballydehob wept with joy at the saving of E700 million and no one thought for a minute that this might be a double act street hustle.

 

   With the E300 million figure set in the public mind and any scraping of credibility for the Tribunal dependent on that figure being honoured, its primary task then became one of internal distribution. A much greater number (17) of barristers became tribunal millionaires than in the cheaper (but, if anything, even grottier) Moriarty Tribunal, but the highest paid got not much more than half of what Moriarty's highest paid got. Still, three senior counsel did manage to cross the E5 million mark. And they never had to travel to the Isle of Man.  

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    Michael Smith BL, whose E10k reward set the whole thing off (it was never paid) wrote: ''Where the tribunal had failed to ask the right questions in many cases the report simply omits the issue, including the failed line of questioning, completely'' and ''The tribunal chose to redact the implausible elements of his (Gogarty's) evidence but the Supreme Court said it should have been left in, to be used against the credibility of Gogarty, generally'' (especially in the criminal courts). 

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    An interesting attempt to tackle the corruption was the privately funded Centre for Public Inquiry, founded mid-Tribunal in 2005 and headed by Frank Connolly. Its mission was ''to independently promote the highest standards of integrity, ethics and accountability across Irish public and business life and to investigate and publicise breaches of those standards where they arise'' - all good. 

   Michael McDowell SC argued that Connolly and/or the CPI could pose a danger to the security of the State, due to Connolly's connections to Sinn Fein and the IRA. The connections were undeniable but irrelevant. Frustratingly, Connolly handled accusations of having used a false passport in Colombia badly, McDowell persuaded the CPI's backer Chuck Feeney to withdraw his funding and the CPI closed in 2006.

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    Gilmartin died in 2013, his health probably fatally damaged by the stress of it all. I believe he was set up twice, first by a political cabal, then by the legal mafia. Pride was his Achilles heel, the weakness through which he could be manipulated.

 

    An under-reported but key aspect of his story is his family's connection to Charles Haughey. Following the death of the businessman John Currid, Haughey (whose accountancy firm Haughey Boland acted for Currid) miraculously acquired ownership of Currid's seaside house and lands in Co. Sligo. Many years later, Haughey's company Larchfield Securities put in a claim to the Land Registry for one and a half acres of farmland mairning the estate. The land belonged to the Gilmartin family. Christina McGoldrick, Tom Gilmartin's sister, confronted Haughey about the claim in public and he backed down. 

 

     As a barrister and powerful politician, Haughey obviously had the option of calling in the judiciary to help him take the property. It is not clear why he chose not to do that. The lack of a paper trail (even the Land Registry claim was made by phone) might have been one thing. Another was that, in contrast to the likes of Albert Reynolds, he was not by nature litigious and preferred to make his acquisitions through projected status and the creation of fear. He was also canny enough to know the dangers such a case might pose to his political ambitions. Whatever caused the retreat, it must have festered with him. It surely cannot have been a coincidence that Gilmartin the successful businessman would come wandering into his zone of influence, needing a little cooperation. 

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    Barristers always insist on having the final word, so let's leave this one to Smith: ''Those of them who proffered advice that led to concealment of evidence and Gogarty's findings being overturned should know that their involvement was a scandal in itself. If they have any professional pride they should return the bulk of their fees to this tired so-called Republic''.