Paul KeenanTom Gilmartin: The man who brought down a Taoiseach and exposed the greed and corruption at the heart of Irish politics, by Frank Connolly (Gill & Macmillan, €16.99 / £14.99)
Joe Carroll
The sub-title tells it all. If it were not for Tom Gilmartin much of what we now know about the corruption in public life in the Ireland of the 19980s and 1990s would still be buried deep under the Liffey Valley Shopping Centre in west Dublin.
But Gilmartin died last November disillusioned at the effects of the Mahon Tribunal which had dominated the last decade of his life.
“What will be done about this corruption?” he remarked to the author after the Tribunal report was finally published. “What good is it to me? I got nothing but a load of abuse and a load of lies told about me. My company and business are gone…The people who caused the rot are walking away scot-free.”
Not everyone. Some people he helped expose went to jail, such as public relations consultant, Frank Dunlop; former assistant Dublin city and county manager, George Redmond; and the late Liam Lawlor. Bertie Ahern was chased from office and his Drumcondra ‘mafia’ exposed; Padraig Flynn’s reputation was permanently damaged. Ironically it was Flynn’s comments about Gilmartin on the Late Late Show in 1999 which provoked him into giving evidence to the Tribunal. Numerous councillors in the Dublin area were also disgraced and there are skeletons in the 3,000-page report which may still be rattled.
Ill-prepared
Because of the publicity around the tribunal as it sat in Dublin Castle for years and its report, one wonders if there is anything more now to be said. But this book makes all that material accessible in a less exhausting form through the personal story of Tom Gilmartin, who sadly has not lived to see its publication. He cooperated fully with the author whose investigative journalism helped to highlight the corruption Gilmartin was to experience when he left aside his successful engineering company in Luton to concentrate on job-creating developments in the Dublin area.
Gilmartin had left a very different Ireland when he emigrated from the family farm at Lislary, Co. Sligo in 1957. He was ill-prepared for the greed and corruption which had infected the planning and re-zoning of rural land in Co. Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s. He was politically a naïf in this shark pool and easy prey for a voracious Liam Lawlor who was abusing his position as a Fianna Fail TD in west Dublin and his close relations with Charles Haughey and other ministers to amass large sums of money in over 100 bank accounts around the world.
Once Lawlor had forced himself on Gilmartin and his English backers, Arlington Securities, there was no shaking him off. He arranged for Gilmartin to meet then Taoiseach Charles Haughey, introduced as the man who was going to bring thousands of jobs to Dublin, and six or seven of his ministers in Leinster House in February 1989. After a few social courtesies, Gilmartin left the room and was immediately approached by a man who said that as he would be making hundreds of millions out of his projects, “we think we should you should give us some of that money up front”. The man who has never been identified, asked Gilmartin to deposit £5million into a bank account in the Isle of Man.
Eulogy
Gilmartin never got over the shock of that encounter although he pressed on with his plan to develop a huge site at Quarrystown in west Dublin. This brought him into opposition with Cork developer Owen O’Callaghan, who also had his eyes on the site. This rivalry was eventually to blow open the corruption of local politicians but it ruined Gilmartin. He claims that Dunlop, who was employed by O’Callaghan to secure the votes of councillors, was responsible for giving false information to the Inland Revenue in Britain which led to his bankruptcy. It is odd that Gilmartin, then such a successful businessman, was not able to avail himself of a tax expert to deal with the false claim.
But one gets the impression that Gilmartin’s stubbornness, so courageous in some areas, was his own worst enemy in other areas where he lacked experience.
In his eulogy of his father, his son, Thomas, referred to this stubbornness as motivating him to create jobs in Ireland which would prevent some young Irish people having to take the emigrant trail like he had.
“Unfortunately, my father was let down repeatedly by men for whom moral scruples, of the type my father lived by, were viewed as weakness.”