Redmond and TD ‘had great double act’

JAILED former council official George Redmond clashed repeatedly at the Planning Tribunal yesterday with retired developer Tom Gilmartin over the date of their first meeting in the late 1980s.

Under cross-examination, Mr Gilmartin insisted their initial meeting took place in May 1988 when the former assistant Dublin city and county manager handed him a colour-coded map of landowners in the Quarryvale area of west Dublin.

The Sligo-born developer claimed the meeting had been arranged by the former Fianna Fáil TD, Liam Lawlor, who was aware that he had an interest in Quarryvale as well as the Bachelor's Walk area of Dublin.

Mr Gilmartin said he was collected by Mr Lawlor from Dublin Airport and brought to the meeting at Mr Redmond's office in Dublin County Council. He also maintained that the former TD sought a "substantial" sum of money for himself and Mr Redmond at the meeting which he later claimed was £100,000 each. "You had a great double act going," he told the former senior official. Mr Redmond, who is legally representing himself, denies that such an event took place. He said that he would have to be "psychic" to have been able to produce such a detailed, relevant map "out of the blue" for Mr Gilmartin if it was their first meeting.

The 80-year-old pensioner, who is being allowed out on day release from Cloverhill Prison, where he is serving a 12-month prison sentence for planning corruption to attend the inquiry, also pointed out that there was no record of such a meeting in his diary or in council documentation.

Instead, Mr Redmond, who referred to himself in the third person throughout most of yesterday's hearing, insists that the first meeting between the pair occurred on July 6, 1988.

However, Mr Gilmartin replied that this date represented a later meeting about "a totally different matter. That was long after the first meeting and you know it," he observed. During a day marked by tedious even surreal detail about land, zoning and the layout of Mr Redmond's office, the two men even disagreed on the definition of the word "hustler," which was used in earlier evidence by Mr Gilmartin to describe Mr Lawlor.

Mr Redmond said he took the phrase, in its Irish context, to mean "a shady dealer; a smooth, fast operator bordering on crooked". Mr Gilmartin replied that he understood it to be someone who "tried to barge in on other people's business".

In relation to the Bachelor's Walk site, Mr Gilmartin acknowledged that Mr Redmond was not one of the parties responsible for pushing up the price of properties in the area which eventually forced him to abandon a project to develop a major shopping centre in the north inner city.

Meanwhile, the inquiry heard from Rory MacCabe SC, that his client, Transport Minister Séamus Brennan, was not present at a meeting with several government ministers in Leinster House in February 1989, including the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, as alleged.

"Nobody has a way of finding out if you are right or wrong," he remarked. Mr Gilmartin agreed that he was not going to change his mind about having seen Mr Brennan at the meeting.