Flynn returns to tribunal to answer Gilmartin claims

FORMER European commissioner Padraig Flynn is due to return to the Mahon Tribunal tomorrow, arising out of a IR£50,000 payment he received from developer Tom Gilmartin nearly 20 years ago.

Mr Gilmartin, who initiated the Quarryvale development in west Dublin in the late 1980s, said he wrote a cheque for the amount as a donation to the Fianna Fáil party in 1989. He said he gave it to Mr Flynn but left the payee section of the cheque blank.

Mr Flynn, who was then environment minister, was an EU commissioner in Brussels in 1998 when news broke of the tribunal’s probe into the payment a decade previously.