THE SATURDAY PROFILE: No-one ever said James Gogarty was easy to get on with. He was a stern father, a tough boss, a cranky pensioner. He fought with picket-lines, threw fits of rage, drove hard bargains. Paul Cullen reports
Having grown up the hard way, he demanded the same high standards as he imposed on himself. As an employer and company "fixer", he brooked no opposition and was prepared to cut corners.
As an old colleague from the building industry once said of him: "Talk to Gogarty? You might as well talk to a jackass!"
Gogarty was also, by his own admission, mired in corruption. He went to Ray Burke's house in June 1989 knowing that the politician was to receive a payoff designed to secure the rezoning of lands owned by Gogarty's company, JMSE.
All of which make the 85-year-old an unlikely hero this weekend after the publication of Mr Justice Flood's report.
But hero he is, all the more so because he crossed the line that divides the silently complicit from the rest of us. He blew the whistle and the whole edifice of lies came tumbling down. Would there were more of his ilk.
But it didn't come about easily or prettily. Gogarty's initial motivation was revenge. He was angry at JMSE and its millionaire owner, Joseph Murphy snr, for failing to reward his loyalty with a decent pension. When he started spilling the beans, he told everyone the long saga about the pension and threw in the encounter in Burke's house as an after-thought.
At first, no-one wanted to know. He brought his grievances to the attention of Nora Owen, Michael McDowell and other politicians, but nothing happened. Prominent journalists walked away from the biggest story of the decade because they couldn't see the story behind the story.
It took the £10,000 reward offered by two anti-corruption campaigners to get things going - not that Gogarty was interested in the money. His allegations started appearing in Sunday newspapers and the process that culminated in this week's report got underway.
Having decided to tell all, Gogarty stuck to his story through thick and thin. At times, it was one frail pensioner versus the rest - lawyers, spin doctors, the political establishment, JMSE and some of the media.
His early relations with the Flood tribunal were turbulent, with Gogarty threatening to withdraw his co-operation. However, a personal meeting between the septuagenarian judge and the octogenarian whistleblower established a basis of trust, and Gogarty became the tribunal's "star" witness.
Those first weeks of his evidence in 1999 were dramatic days. Gogarty caught the mood of the nation with his shocking tales of corruption, his David vs Goliath struggles against the establishment and his railings against the legal profession.
Hundreds came to see him in action and cheer him on in his battles. Nightly re-enactments of the evidence on Vincent Browne's radio show made him a household name. By the time he completed his evidence, his departure was greeted with matinee idol-style adulation.
Since then, he has disappeared into the relative obscurity in north Dublin whence he came. This weekend, Gogarty is said to be "quietly pleased" about Mr Justice Flood's verdict. He has had countless requests for interviews and photographs but doesn't wish to enter the limelight. The relief is even greater for his wife Anna, for whom the ordeal of the past decade can now finally be consigned to the past.
Gogarty was one of the old school - thrifty, hardworking and tough. Born in Kells in 1917, he left school after the Inter Cert to work as a bricklayer. He served in the reserve Gardaí while attending night-school and emerged with a degree 17 years after starting.
It was in 1968 that Gogarty's career took its final, fateful turn. He went to work for Joseph Murphy snr, who ran his operations from offshore tax havens. Gogarty managed his Irish interests, which included JMSE, a huge landbank of agricultural land in north Dublin and the Gaiety Theatre.
He was the epitome of the loyal company executive; in one letter, he even addressed his boss as "your loyal servant". He took sandwiches to work rather than spend unnecessarily at the company's expense. In his late 60s, he spent several years working on Murphy's behalf in the UK, living in hotels and seeing Anna and his six children only at weekends.
He ran the Irish end of Murphy's empire with an iron hand. When a strike broke out at Moneypoint in Co Clare, where JMSE had a €13 million contract to build an electricity generating station, there were allegations of intimidation. Gogarty also presided over the slow decay of Turvey House, a fine old north Dublin period house that lay on lands owned by Murphy, which were earmarked for building development.
Whatever Murphy wanted, Gogarty did his bidding. It was no different in 1989, Mr Justice Flood has now decided, when JMSE and the developer Michael Bailey decided to do a deal on the north Dublin lands and the money was paid to Ray Burke.
In the 1990s, it all went sour between Gogarty and his boss. Gogarty pressed for his pension and even coralled some money which was due to JMSE as a bargaining chip.
He took legal action against the company and won. In 1994, Murphy's son rang him late one night and delivered a tirade of abuse and threatened to "break every bone in your fucking body".
Out of this bitter dispute came the nugget of information which culminated in this week's report. We still don't know the whole truth about who gave how much to Burke and, most important of all, why. By now, we'll probably never know.
But as Gogarty himself memorably said: "The answer is out there, it's flowing in the wind".