Gilmartin claims deputy warned him he was ‘being shafted’

TOM GILMARTIN claims he was secretly warned by a Fianna Fáil TD that he was being “shafted” in his plans for retail centres at Bachelors Walk and Quarryvale.

Mr Gilmartin told the Mahon Tribunal the late deputy Sean Walsh approached him in a corridor in Leinster House as he left a meeting with government ministers on February 1, 1989 and gave him the names of about eight county council members he said would be involved in the material contravention of the county development plan he needed to get land rezoned for Quarryvale.

Mr Gilmartin said he was walking from the meeting when he heard a man shouting behind him. “When I turned this small, stoutish, red-faced man was beckoning me to come back,” Mr Gilmartin said.

“He beckoned me to an office which seemed to be a partition kind of office. His opening statement to me was that: ‘You are being set up, you are being shafted and Mr Liam Lawlor is at the centre of it.’ Then he reeled off a number of names to me.”

Mr Gilmartin said he could not hear exactly what Sean Walsh was saying because he was mumbling and because Mr Gilmartin was upset after an incident moments before.

This was the incident he has already given evidence about when he claimed a man he did not know approached him, gave him a piece of paper with an Isle of Man bank account number, and demanded he lodge £5 million into it.

He told the tribunal last week when he rejected this demand, remarking such behaviour was worse than the mafia, the man told him he could end up in the Liffey.

Mr Gilmartin said yesterday this was one of the reasons he did not take in everything Mr Walsh said. He said he did not know who to believe at that point and had concluded “the place was totally corrupt”.

He said the only names he remembered with certainty that Mr Walsh gave him were Liam Lawlor, Finbarr Hanrahan and Paddy Hickey.

Mr Gilmartin insisted he was perfectly clear about the events immediately prior to his encounter with Mr Walsh, when he says he met Charles Haughey, Bertie Ahern, Albert Reynolds, Seamus Brennan, Ray Burke, Pádraig Flynn, Gerard Collins, Brian Lenihan and Mary O’Rourke and discussed his plans with them.

All except Mary O’Rourke, who recalls the meeting, and Mr Haughey, who has said he is too ill to give evidence, have denied any knowledge of such a meeting.

Mr Gilmartin said yesterday he knew the meeting took place and he knew who was there.

“If you bring me a graphic designer, I will paint the room for you and the corridor and the lift,” he said.