Developer sought allies in corridors of power

Former FF ministers bar one dispute Gilmartin meeting, Harry McGee reports.

Tom Gilmartin is a big man with a direct manner. He still has his Sligo accent after 40 years of living in England, and a booming bass profundo voice. He wouldn’t exactly strike you as a man you would easily forget.

“I seem to have some problem with being invisible and being some kind of ghost that turns up,” he says.

Central to Mr Gilmartin’s accounts are two meetings he says he had with senior FF politicians to get over problems he was having with planning, tax designation and politicians and officials looking for graft.

But not alone do the ministers dispute Mr Gilmartin’s account: they say the meetings never took place. One of the meetings/ non-meetings is readily familiar. It relates to him being meeted and greeted by Charlie Haughey and his inner circle of ministers in Leinster House in January 1989.

But yesterday, another meeting/ non-meeting came up as Mr Gilmartin described meeting Ray MacSharry in 1989. Not once. But twice.

This revelation came as a surprise to the huge media throng and packed galleries of Dublin Castle. This hasn’t leaked out before. It also came as a surprise to the Mahon legal team, who had been unaware of Mr Gilmartin’s meeting with Mr MacSharry in the summer of 1987 at his constituency office in Sligo.

Mr MacSharry, we were told, had no recollection of the meeting. That prompted Mr Gilmartin to comment almost ruefully he must be a kind of an invisible ghost.

However, his version seemed to be corroborated by a memo written in December 1987 by a Dublin solicitor, referring to Mr Gilmartin’s meeting with Mr MacSharry the previous Thursday. That memo also seemed to suggest why Mr Gilmartin had sought such high-level meetings with ministers.

Only half of the property bank in Bachelors Walk enjoyed tax designation. The memo indicates he got assurances from Mr MacSharry that the designated area would be extended, that the timescale would be increased from its then three-year limit and the designation would be made more favourable.

Just before the end of the day, he said he had got the same assurances from Padraig Flynn and from Bertie Ahern, then a senior minister. That claim will play a central part in this module, expected to last at least a year.

The three larger-than-life protagonists, Mr Gilmartin, Liam Lawlor and Mr Flynn, were all present yesterday for an absorbing day split into three parts: an opening statement: Mr Lawlor’s swashbuckling reply and the beginning of Mr Gilmartin’s evidence.

Many of the main allegations have been well ventilated already but that did not take away from their impact. Mr Gilmartin’s version of events is of a successful ex-pat Samaritan arriving back to his penury-laden homeland to bring jobs but being battered into submission by greedy politicians, trying to tap him for outrageous sums.

A big-framed man with a square face, square glasses and a thick crop of silver hair, his opening hour was relatively muted, with little of the colour that marked his evidence during the Sherwin libel case in the High Court.

He gave a brief biography. Mr Lawlor had referred to him as leaving Sligo with bare feet and trousers in bad condition. “Mr Lawlor has reminded us of my background,” he said in his opening remarks.

Mr Gilmartin had emigrated in 1957 and had made his money as a mechanical handler in the motor industry. In the 1980s he diverted into assembling properties for retail schemes.

“I had a bit of a flair for putting schemes together,” he said.

His two Dublin projects, Quarryvale (where he wanted to build Europe’s largest shopping centre) and Bachelors Walk seemed of biblical ambition in the deprived Ireland of the 1980s.

His fee for completing the projects for Arlington would be £250,000 plus 20% share of the profit. His job was to implement it in the markets and politically.

He said he knew no politicians in Ireland when he began. But by the time he finished two years later, he had met not only all of Ireland’s most senior politicians and the ubiquitous George Redmond, but also had had to pay massive sums to some of them.

This is how it panned out in Mr Gilmartin’s eyes. Liam Lawlor, in one account, received £135,000 from Arlington; Pee Flynn got £50,000; Mr Lawlor and George Redmond were looking for 50 grand apiece at one stage; and a councillor demanded £100,000 up front from him in Buswell’s Hotel.

The most egregious demand of all took place after the meeting/ non-meeting with Mr Haughey and the boys at Leinster House, says Mr Gilmartin.

At the end of the meeting he was approached by another man who he did not recognise who suggested he pay £5m and handed him a piece of paper with an Isle of Man bank account number scrawled on it.

“I rejected the man’s approach in colourful terms and told him: ‘You make the f**king Mafia look like monks’.” The other man responded: “You could end up in the Liffey for that statement.”

However, when Mr Gilmartin later complained to senior Dublin officials about this he seemed to name Mr Lawlor as that man. It’s a contradiction he will need to explain in evidence.

There’s another contradiction that needs to be explained. All the senior FFers have no recollection of the meeting/non-meeting with Mr Haughey; Mr Ahern; Albert Reynolds; Ray Burke; Seamus Brennan; Gerry Collins; Mr Flynn; and Mr Lawlor.

All except one. Mary O’Rourke has told the tribunal she recollects the meeting and recalls that most of her Cabinet colleagues were there.