Chickens Coming Home

 

When I was seven years old, I did a bad thing. I defied authority in school and opened a door I was told not to go near. I received a series of punishments for this which had a bad effect on me. I quickly became a burden on my parents, who had fallen on hard times around the same time due to our dairy herd being decimated by disease. They had managed to build a new house before this happened and were rightly proud of it and the comfort it provided - running water and everything. 

One of the great joys of my life was to look after them when they were no longer fully able to look after themselves. They stayed living in their home, a place where they were almost always happy. 

My mother went into a coma, isolated and extremely distressed (the night nurse's report doesn't make for pleasant reading), on a Covid ward in Mullingar during Christmas 2020. She died a day later. My father's death was not much more natural. Though I had become very close to both of them, they'd had good lives and I didn't feel huge grief. That would change late last May. 

This was the scene at their home after it was attacked. I was devastated by it and barely slept for weeks afterwards. It felt like a desecration, equal to an attack on their grave. Things that were precious to them were smashed to pieces. [Following a later break-in, my brother's old Athlone Town scarf was left dangling from the top of a wardrobe] It happened shortly before the house was to pass from probate into my possession and not long after its insurance had lapsed (it is insured now). Most of the Gardai thought the attack was too extreme to be vandalism, that there was something personal behind it, most likely a family feud.  

It looked like they had it wrong when I found out that two boys did it. I felt like strangling them, though on reflection I am sorry to have thought that way. It now appears that they were paid to do a job and did it to the letter. Nothing was stolen, none of the small amount of money in the house was moved and the car parked outside was untouched. It should be kept in mind that we live in a town where at least one solicitor hands out tenners to those he considers to be promising gurriers (as opposed to kids pushing boundaries and finding their way in life), so that they will consider crime as a career and know where to go when they get caught.  

Around six weeks after the attack, a good friend of mine - who happens to be closely related to Garda Dully - told me that a woman had turned up at her place of work, saying that she was looking all around Athlone and especially in the Ballykeeran area for a house to do up and live in. I was curious and agreed to meet the woman and her partner, who drove one of those Mercedes that developers tend to drive - 'S' Class, I think. He made an offer that was a lot of money but less than is being paid for sites in the area. He also wanted extra land for the price, saying that it was for a garden and ''Don't be thinking I'd put 2 or 3 houses into it''. It turned out that neither had any obvious reason to want to live in Athlone.  

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The same man who served me with a summons on behalf of Garda Dully last March turned up again today at around 4-30.  This time he had two big envelopes, one for me and one for my company. After I told him to f... off with himself and turned to walk away, he threw them at my back - which is fair enough, I suppose. 

Again, I have no intention of opening the envelopes and engaging with these people in any way. They can steal what they want to steal (E1.3 million is a number they recently claimed I 'owed' one of their clubs, not specifying which one nor explaining why I would 'owe' anything to a club rather than to the litigant Garda Dully) through using their friends in our courts. No one can do anything to stop corruption once it is an accepted part of a nation's culture, but I can refuse to comply with the courts under these circumstances. 

They obviously can put me in prison. I just hope they don't chicken out of doing that the way they chicken out of doing anything which comes with an element of risk. For want of any other option, I can then go on hunger strike in order to put pressure on my solicitor to obey the instruction she is refusing to obey (#). I have no problem in giving my life, if it comes to that, for the basic principle of an entitlement to justice (not to win, no one is entitled to that). When any court goes wrong, it must be righted and seen to be righted. Justice is bigger than any collection of crooked human beings, however important they think themselves to be. It is the friend of every honest person, often their only friend. It swamps for me my other responsibilities, to the company and to the cooperative - both proxies for the people of Athlone. Both are good things, worth fighting for but not dying for.

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The confidence of these well connected fraudsters is justified, given the apparent desire of all authorities to become their friends. In the twelve years since they first refused to pay the rent, there has only been one lapse - in May 2015. Garda Dully phoned me on that occasion and shouted at me about the terrible job he had trying to get a licence for the club. That is the last time I spoke to him, if you could call it speaking. He was studying law at the time.

You'd imagine that he'd be happy enough to get away so long with hiding behind the sofa when the landlord came to collect. Not a bit of it. This is the fourth summons he has served on my company, the second on myself. We have been subjected to all kinds of threats, starting with an absurd threat to bring us to the High Court if we didn't hand the stadium over to himself and John Hayden. Dully and Hayden were pretending at the time to be not only trustees of the club (they weren't) but to be the only living trustees of the club (Jack Kenny, Paddy McCaul, Tom McEnroe and Paddy Martin were all living trustees in 2004, Ken Bryan and Matthew Lough were appointed trustees before 2008). The threat to High Court us was delivered by my solicitor - yes, my solicitor - Martin Egan in the Shamrock Lodge Hotel in December 2016. 

Both Garda Dully and John Hayden flirted with perjury by also misrepresenting themselves as trustees in the High Court. Dully compounded the offense by twice submitting a bogus version of the constitution of the club, which notably (and absurdly) at 34 (b) replaced ''... the number of such Trustees shall not be more than ten nor less than five'' with ''... the number of such Trustees shall not exceed three''. He may well have been unaware that the constitution was fraudulent, and therefore not guilty of fabricating evidence (under Clause 7b of the Criminal Justice Act 2021), but he cannot but have known that he was never a trustee.

[Unlike in the UK, perjury is rarely prosecuted here. The only person I know to have been convicted for perjury under the aforementioned Criminal Justice Act is the Limerick hurler Pat Ryan, who denied getting a summons for driving offences and was caught out. But that was an affront to court procedural power, not an attempted facilitation of fraud through the court. I think it's fair to say that the Irish barristers would prefer if perjury and the corrupt judge's offense of treason could be removed from the statute book altogether, as they limit their field of play - or would do, if they were ever prosecuted. Treason used to be a capital crime in this country. Today it is barely a crime at all.]

Dully was later supplanted in the pecking order by Michael O'Connor, for reasons that are unknown. After an ineptly rigged High Court case, the property ended up in a new company called Athlone Town AFC CLG. Dully was the secretary but not a director, so it was O'Connor and Hayden who got the lion's share of the moolah. Dully has been collecting a lot of cash though, from circuses and local football clubs, for the 'renting' of our stadium. Where does it go? Who knows. Maybe he might share with us how many cash lodgements have been made to his company's account over the past six years, and proof of same. 

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It is possible that this latest move is a sign of desperation. On balance, I doubt that it is. They simply think they have their best chance of getting away with it at this time, possibly thanks to its being made to fit in with the distraction of the coming general election. They should be desperate by right, because we are now just two months away from the Legal Service Regulatory Authority's decision on one of the solicitors I reported to them nearly four years ago. That solicitor's most flagrant transgression was organising evidence to be planted explicitly in order to benefit and expand Dully's case. 

The LSRA has, by any objective analysis, an open-and-shut case to deal with. They acknowledge that the offence is very serious and the solicitor has not denied any of it. But a guilty verdict and inevitable criminal prosecution would be unthinkable to the barristers. My guess is that they will intervene and declare that this is an important matter which needs to be investigated further - immediately doing away with what will then be four years and one month of my dealings with the LSRA. They will then set up a little kangaroo tribunal which will come to an appropriate decision. 'Appropriate' is a favourite word of theirs and an Irish barrister's arm-chancing arrogance might be summarised thus: 'It is appropriate for me to appropriate your lifetime earnings for my service to this court. It is not appropriate for you to question the conduct of this court'.

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I am angry at what is happening, but I cannot let the anger take hold of me. These types like to provoke and would obviously seize on any intemperate reaction. I'd like to think that the people of my town will show some support one day - just as I'd like to think that legal professionals will one day do their jobs instead of favours for each other -  but that is wishful thinking and I have learned never to rely on anyone I don't live with. All I can say is that nothing has changed. The stadium will never be allowed to fall into private hands. That is as true today with regard to the ambitions of Messrs. O'Connor and Hayden as it was thirteen years ago with regard to whatever plans were guiding the actions of Ulster Bank and ACC. 

I never would have believed a decade ago that I would still be stuck with looking after this albatross in 2024. My intention was for the club to own and run it, once it was sufficiently reformed to be demonstrably capable of doing so. Along the way, my hand was forced in first agreeing to sell it to the FAI and then effectively agreeing to sell it to Westmeath County Council - both at a significant loss but securing the most important thing, public ownership. 

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If Garda Dully wants to take me and my company on, he still has the option of doing it in a court of law. Our witnesses Philip O'Farrell, John Comber and Tom Burke have been waiting five years to be cross-examined on their affidavits. What is Dully scared of? They can bring back Judge Humphreys or any of John Hayden's golfing partners to preside, I don't care who it is. As long as the judge puts in writing why our witnesses' evidence is unconvincing and his judgment on this passes all the higher courts, Messrs. O'Connor and Hayden can then take ownership of our stadium, my farm and my home. 

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'Act in conscience and trust in God' is a good maxim to live by. I struggle with the second part, as history (and the News) shows that God never does shit to protect decent people from psycho-/sociopaths. All they get is a promise that they'll be looked after when they're dead, it's in a contract somewhere. But who wrote the contract?

Push open the doors they don't want opened, folks. There's nothing good happening behind them. 

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                                                ''You got to keep your eye on the ball''

(*) Her instruction is to apply to the Supreme Court, primarily on the basis that the Court of Appeal had no right to claim I was party to a settlement when the High Court had already ruled that I had nothing to do with it. The ruling was based on empirical fact - a digital audio recording - and that is why Messrs. McCaul and Dully never appealed the judgment, also why the fine judges of the Court of Appeal could only 'overturn' the ruling by pretending they missed that bit - just like they missed my company's constitution and the three affidavits referred to above. You wouldn't want to leave these guys in charge of your chicken coop.

There can be no adversarial law without the system of instruction. A solicitor cannot make up his or her own instruction. The instruction may be based on mistaken premises arising from flawed legal advice or poor interpretation of same by the litigant. But it is the instruction and that is it. Anything else is lawlessness. Outside of something which challenges his or her obligations under the Solicitor's Guide to Professional Conduct, there is no reason for any solicitor to refuse instruction - except in the pragmatic or expedient context of a case being rigged against his or her client and not wanting to upset that process. All five of my and our solicitors have now refused instruction from either me or my company.