Noel O'Gara loves annoying people, whether they are West Yorkshire police or the residents of Dublin's Dartmouth Square, which he owns, and where he has set up a tile shop in a caravan, writes Kathy Sheridan
Noel O'Gara sits in his shabby, red, '97 registered Ford Scorpio - "got it for nothing off a friend of mine" - to one side of the single, unlocked gate to Dartmouth Square park in Dublin 6, armed with a lunch roll, a bottle of fruit juice and a big, Benny Hill-style grin. A large, unsmiling, monosyllabic lieutenant in a blue van is keeping guard on the right. The entrance is dominated by O'Gara's rudimentary marble and granite "showroom", complete with cheap plastic table and chairs. His most recent embellishment to this quintessentially middle-class, arboreal splendour, overlooked by tasteful, €3-€4-million houses, is - shudder - a scruffy little caravan, presently occupied by a homeless gent who may or may not pay his dues by picking up the mounting litter.
"These are acts of ownership," says O'Gara cheerfully. "I could go round naked if I want to and lock everyone out." He would.
His "vision" for the venerable space has ranged from a budget car-park and crèche, to a couple of luxury eight-to-nine storey apartment blocks. Meanwhile, he says, upping the ante, a 2,000-strong world association of couriers has approached him for "tent city"-type accommodation in the summer.
For validation, O'Gara's constant fall-back is the 1937 Constitution, "and the property rights that good, decent people fought and died for".
The problem for Dartmouth Square residents, and for the dilatory Dublin City Council, is that Noel O'Gara has no shame. He gets a kick out of representing the park as a nice little greenfield site. "I'm not a philanthropist. If you owned it, would you turn it over to those millionaires? Two of those houses are for sale at [ around €3.5 million] each and a lot of them have sold off their own back gardens for a million. They only want this square for themselves. D'you think they'll be inviting anyone in from Tallaght to share it?"
IT MAY BE mildly consoling to Dartmouth Square residents to know that Noel O'Gara has spent a virtual lifetime getting up people's noses: police officers on both sides of the Irish Sea, an English judge, senior British journalists, a hapless conservation ranger in the midlands, a slew of home-owners . . .
Now aged 62, he was born in Ballaghadereen, Co Roscommon, where his father was a small-time "wheeler-dealer" in cattle. He went on to qualify (and he stresses the qualification) as a chartered accountant in 1969. Within a year, he says, he was the first man in Ireland to import plastic bags and "made a good bit of money . . . and bought a few bits of land". Then one day in 1977, he was on the way to Ballaghadereen and spotted a For Sale sign on an old Georgian pile, Ballinahowen Court, near Athlone. For that and 60 acres, he paid £66,000 at auction.
In what may be a motif of O'Gara's life, he says he was "sweating" over it, because if the auctioneer had cashed his cheque promptly, it would have bounced. He continues to live there with Mon, his Thai wife, who was 25 (and the groom 47) when they met in Bangkok in 1992. Bishop Pat Buckley married the pair in the Burlington Hotel, possibly in the lounge bar, for which he received £30 and a free dinner.
In the meantime, O'Gara had been buying up little houses around East Wall, in Dublin's north inner city, for £1,000 apiece. But, as the income from each was a pittance, only around £7 to £10 a week, he decided to turn his own house into a hotel to generate some money. In 1978, he hired a man to advise him on antiques and as a general fixer, a man - let's call him Harry - who was "a howl a minute", but who, it emerged, had 49 serious assault convictions.
O'Gara became afraid of him. Then one night in 1979, amid a massive publicity campaign to unmask the Yorkshire Ripper, who had murdered at least 18 women, O'Gara was reading a profile in the Daily Telegraph and "realised" to his horror that the Ripper in his eyes was none other than Harry. It changed his life. He was now terrified of Harry, naturally, and began to visit Bangkok, to get as far away as possible, he says, and "just to get my mind together". His sister and two brothers thought he was crazy (as, to be fair, did almost everyone else). "My hair went grey. It looks dark now but I use 'Just for Men' every few weeks". Undaunted by the conviction of Peter Sutcliffe, O'Gara sat down in 1982, and wrote a book, The Real Yorkshire Ripper. It took only three months, but cost him his properties and £100,000 for a book that no-one would distribute, leaving him with a £50,000 debt.
A mortgage taken out on his home gave him a "breather". He set up a company making canopies in Ferbane and hawked them around the midlands up until about 10 years ago. Then, around 2000, unable to afford to buy into property, he got into the ground rent business. A solicitor he knew had a number of them and they included the Darley estate, which included not only Dartmouth Square park but some 20 of the houses in the square. "I saw value in them. If they wanted to build mews houses at the back, they'd have to buy out the freehold and you might get a few grand . . ."
He is quite pleased with himself for having the foresight to upend the city council and some of the city's wealthiest citizens.
It is in his nature to dig his heels in. His Ripper website, www.yorkshireripper.com, is constantly updated and he is not entirely alone in his obsession. In a 2005 article by Chris Benfield in the Yorkshire Post, a former deputy chairman of the West Yorkshire Police Authority was adamant in his belief that "there were definitely two murderers involved in the 13 [ of which Sutcliffe was convicted] . . . I do believe Sutcliffe was found guilty of more murders than he could possibly have committed." But hadn't Sutcliffe confessed? This, retorts O'Gara, was before the "confessions" of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. He is convinced that Harry poisoned two Irish people.
O'GARA DID PREVAIL upon the West Yorkshire police to travel to Ireland in 1981 to interview Harry but they went away again, leaving O'Gara rather nervous. Harry has since gone missing, evading a sentence for assault. When Benfield joined the Yorkshire Post in 1990, "all its senior journalists groaned at the mention of O'Gara". Nonetheless, in 2005, O'Gara was back in Leeds, to picket in the rain outside the court where Sutcliffe's old solicitor, Kerry Macgill, was sitting as a judge, and to leaflet outside the offices of the Yorkshire Post among others, accusing them all of having blood on their hands. Both Benfield and O'Gara believe that the latter's theories were given new life by the internet.
"O'Gara has been given fresh energy and encouragement through his website", said Benfield, "and he still has enough money, assisted by a trickle of sales of his book, to take himself and his supporters around the country, to play to the public taste for a rebel, hector journalists and threaten Judge Macgill with a citizen's arrest."
HIS TASTE FOR controversy featured in the Athlone Topic, after a conservation ranger from the Department of the Environment gave evidence in the District Court last June that O'Gara had removed hedgerows with a digger in the nesting season. O'Gara first said he had nothing to do with it, then conceded that he had something to do with it only when confronted with evidence that he was the owner, before eventually admitting he had got a contractor to remove the hedgerows.
He defended himself in court, and almost got away with it by claiming that he was exempted. Typically undaunted, before he left the courtroom, reported Finian Coghlan in the Athlone Topic, "Mr O'Gara asked to approach the bench and to much hilarity presented a copy of his book to the judge".
He featured in a different forum the year before when a correspondent to askaboutmoney.com asked for advice about "a note in the door from someone in Athlone (Noel O'Gara) who claims that I as the owner of my house owe him a sum of money for ground rent (which apparently hadn't been paid since 1987 although I only purchased it last year)?" The writer was wondering was it "just another scammer chancing his luck (as it seems to me)?" Among the replies was this: "Exact same thing happened to us and in fact the letter was so badly written (and nearly threatening!) that we presumed it was a scam. I rang the Land Registry just to be sure and it was actually legit."
Noel O'Gara may like to portray himself as a country bumpkin . . . But buyer beware.
TheO'GaraFile
Who is he?
The Offaly businessman who bought the freehold to Dartmouth Square park for a lot less than 10,000, under the lethargic nose of Dublin City Council.
Why is he in the news?
He has put the two-acre park up for sale, seeking offers of around 100 million (apparently).
Most appealing characteristic?
A colourful character who adds to the gaiety of the nation ...
Least appealing characteristic?
...though not if you own a 4m house in Dartmouth Square.
Most likely to say:
"It's your land; the Constitution says you can do what you like."
Least likely to say:
"Property is theft."