Diarmuid Doyle: Blockbuster tribunal that went way over budget
Those who damn the Mahon Tribunal highlight its enormous cost to the taxpayer -- the tens of millions spent conducting its often-tedious business over 13 long years, the barristers who earned more than a million euros, and the greedy expense claims.
But those who praise it remember an inquiry that often gripped the nation, that uncovered evidence of massive corruption in Irish planning, helped unseat a Taoiseach, and produced a cast of characters who could have graced a Charles Dickens' novel.
It was a blockbuster that went way over budget, but produced plenty of thrills and spills along the way.
Its main hero in the early days (when it was known as the Flood Tribunal) was James Gogarty, a former garda from Co Meath who quit the force and went to work for a company called Joseph Murphy Structural Engineering (JMSE).
Feisty, outspoken, and completely unfazed by the judges and barristers who surrounded him at the tribunal, his evidence quickly made him a household name. Queues formed outside the tribunal as people scrambled to see the "plucky pensioner", as he became known. And what tales he had to tell.
Mr Gogarty recalled a visit he made to the house of Fianna Fail minister Ray Burke in June 1989, accompanied by James Murphy, who owned JMSE, and Michael Bailey, a builder who ran Bovale Developments with his brother Tom.
They were there to hand over £30,000 in bribes to Mr Burke in return for the minister's help in securing planning permission for a huge development in North County Dublin involving the Bailey brothers and JMSE.
After the meeting, Mr Gogarty said he had asked Mr Bailey whether they'd be getting a receipt from Mr Burke for the money. "Will we f**k," was the famous reply, which became a national catchphrase for a time and was even the title of a popular comedy show starring Joe Taylor and Malcolm Douglas.
The tribunal later found that the payment to Mr Burke had been corrupt, as had another he had received in relation to the granting of a licence to Century Radio.
Mr Burke, one of the chief villains of the tribunal story, was sentenced to six months in prison for his failure to pay tax on the money from Century.
Mr Gogarty was also a key witness in the downfall of another of the wayward characters who came before the tribunal. George Redmond, the former assistant city and county manager at Dublin Corporation, had received bribes from Joseph Murphy, Mr Gogarty claimed. The tribunal agreed and also concluded that Mr Redmond had accepted other corrupt payments. Mr Redmond was sentenced to jail in 2003 for receiving two bribes, but his conviction was later quashed.
Mr Gogarty's salty language wasn't a rarity at the tribunal. His "will we f**k" phase was almost surpassed by developer Tom Gilmartin, who came to the inquiry with an array of allegations against Bertie Ahern and a claim that Fianna Fail "make the mafia look like f**king monks".
It was Mr Gilmartin, more than anybody else, who brought Mr Ahern to the attention of the tribunal, alleging that he had received bribes from developer Owen O'Callaghan, although there had been an earlier incident in 1999 in which a fantasist called Denis 'Starry' O'Brien, a businessman from Cork, alleged he had paid a bribe to Mr Ahern on behalf of Mr O'Callaghan. Mr Ahern sued Mr O'Brien and won. The allegation was "utterly completely and absolutely false and untrue", the trial judge said, awarding the then-Taoiseach £30,000 in damages.
Mr Ahern had dismissed Mr Gilmartin's claims as equally false and said he was certain that Judge Alan Mahon would agree in his imminent report. But they were enough to send the tribunal trawling through the former Taoiseach's accounts where they soon discovered a pattern of unexplained lodgment, many of them in dollars and sterling.
Explaining these, Mr Ahern came up with a series of colourful stories and characters.
There was Mick Wall, the businessman bus-driver who ferried a team of generous donors to a meal in Manchester, but "didn't eat the dinner". Those people gave him stg£8,000 out of the blue, Mr Ahern said.
Then there was Paddy 'The Plasterer' Reilly who, with three other friends, gave Mr Ahern an unsolicited gift of IR£16,500, possibly to buy a house. And Celia Larkin, of course, Mr Ahern's former girlfriend, who received a IR£30,000 loan from his constituency organisation to buy a house on the North Circular Road in Dublin.
Other compelling characters came and went as the tribunal grappled with its task. There was Liam Lawlor, the former Fianna Fail TD who received three separate jail sentences -- six weeks in total -- for refusing to co-operate with the tribunal, and who was released temporarily during one of these so he could travel to the Dail and defend himself against a motion calling on him to resign.
There was Frank Dunlop, who gave evidence of the many bribes he had given to councillors in Dublin, and who was later jailed following an investigation by the Criminal Assets Bureau into his behaviour.
There was Liam Cosgrave, one of those councillors and the son of a former Taoiseach, and Padraig Flynn, the former European Commissioner, whose smug, self-satisfied performance on 'The Late Late Show' so annoyed Tom Gilmartin that he informed the tribunal of a IR£50,000 payment he claimed he had once given to Mr Flynn. Mr Cosgrave denies accepting bribes for favourable planning votes.
Most compellingly, perhaps, there was Grainne Carruth, Bertie Ahern's former secretary, who had lodged some of Mr Ahern's money to various accounts. For almost two days at the tribunal, she stuck to Mr Ahern's story that there had been no sterling lodgment before breaking down in the witness box.
"I want to go home," she cried.
She finally agreed that the lodgment had been in sterling, but Mr Ahern's failure to protect his loyal secretary from such an experience disgusted many people in and out of politics.
A few months later, his reputation tarnished, he resigned as Taoiseach, arguably the tribunal's biggest scalp.
The inquiry might have cost the earth, but it often produced results.
Irish Independent
