ANALYSIS: Gardaí investigated the former minister as far back as 1974, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Murder will out. That was the title of a book launched by Mr Ray Burke in 1990, a racy tale by one-time journalist Tom Reddy of famous Irish murders. The truth about Mr Burke is finally out, more than a quarter of a century after other journalists first suspected he was a deeply corrupt politician.
It was as long ago as 1974 that Mr Burke first featured in dispatches on the murky relationship between politics and planning in Co Dublin. In the same year, he was the subject of a Garda investigation into land rezoning in Swords, which focused on his relationship with the prolific house builders, Brennan and McGowan.
This followed publication by Hibernia and the Sunday Independent of detailed stories exposing various land deals in the county. Journalist Joe McAnthony produced an extract from the accounts of a Brennan and McGowan company showing a fee payment of £15,000 to Mr Burke under the heading "planning".
Mr Burke was, of course, wearing two hats. Under one, he was a member of Dublin County Council, actively involved in the rezoning of land for residential development in Swords - including land which had been acquired by Brennan and McGowan. Under the other, he was the auctioneer engaged to sell the houses they built in the area.
Brennan and McGowan made a practice of acquiring options on agricultural land around Swords that was never intended for development and then moving to have it rezoned, more often than not against the advice of Dublin County Council's planners. The same was generally true, much later, of Bovale Developments.
They were all from Co Mayo - Mr Tom Brennan and Mr Joe McGowan, Bovale's Mr Michael Bailey and his brother Tom, and Mr Burke's father, Mr P.J. Burke, known as "The Bishop". The latter had served as a TD for Dublin North from 1944 to 1973 and passed his seat to his son, who was running the family business.
Mr Burke became one of the "movers and shakers" on Dublin County Council, particularly on land rezoning. He eclipsed even the likes of Mr Liam Lawlor in this regard, so assiduously representing the interests of his clients he could only have been doing it for the money. For him, the public interest didn't seem to exist.
And land rezoning can cost the public dearly. In Swords, it was always intended the bypass would ultimately become part of the M1 Dublin-Belfast motorway. But so much land alongside it was rezoned for housing, some of it at Mr Burke's initiative, that a new motorway had to be built further east at a cost of millions of euro.
In 1974, Mr Burke insisted there was no connection between the £15,000 "planning" payment and a motion he had seconded to rezone Brennan and McGowan's land at Mountgorry, east of Swords. He also said the sale of the land, to which the payment related, had not gone through and that he had never got the money.
Mr Burke was interviewed by members of the Garda Fraud Squad on more than 20 occasions, but no prosecution ensued. This was Ireland, after all, and our culture tolerated corrupt politicians. The anti-corruption legislation that the Garda could rely on was a British statute, enacted in - of all years - 1916.
And so, having escaped justice in 1974, Mr Burke could carry on regardless. Even on his last day in office as Minister for the Environment both in 1981 and 1982, he packed An Bord Pleanála with political cronies, including his own constituency adviser, Mr Tony Lambert, and Brennan and McGowan's architect, Mr John P. Keenan.
It was Mr Lambert who put his name to a curious decision by the appeals board to grant permission to a Brennan and McGowan company, Criteria Developments Ltd, for an office development on the Plantation site in Herbert Street, in Dublin city centre - just 11 days before the Burke-appointed board was replaced in March 1984.
Mr Keenan was the architect of Briargate, Mr Burke's house in Swords, which had been built by a Brennan and McGowan company, Oak Park Developments Ltd.
It had long been suspected by journalists, including me, that the house was built for him free of charge. But how could any of us prove it, given the onerous constraints of the libel laws? All we had was circumstantial evidence about Mr Burke's close relationship with Brennan and McGowan and other developers - and the hope that readers would have the savvy to read between the lines.
Mr Burke was red-faced with rage or, perhaps, embarrassment when Mr Pat Rabbitte TD read into the Dáil record the contents of two pages from my 1989 book, Saving the City, which detailed his close connections with Brennan and McGowan - though without being able to draw the obvious conclusion that this relationship was essentially corrupt.
Also in 1989, during the course of another fruitless Garda investigation into land rezoning corruption in Co Dublin, a detective superintendent remarked to me that Mr Burke could probably produce a fake mortgage for Briargate. At the time, Mr Burke was Minister for Justice, having been appointed by Mr Charles J. Haughey.
As it happens, he couldn't even produce a fake mortgage. Last year, he sold the house he got as a present from Brennan and McGowan to developers Flynn and O'Flaherty for nearly £3 million (€3.8 million). Briargate will now be demolished and the acre site on which it stands will be incorporated into the adjoining Pavilions shopping centre.
By right, it should be preserved for conversion into a National Sleaze Museum. Visitors could even be shown the sideboard into which Mr Burke put the famous brown envelope containing at least £30,000 cash in June 1989. But the former minister will probably need the proceeds of the sale to pay a belated Revenue bill.
No more than the media, the Revenue wouldn't have known about Mr Burke's foreign bank accounts or Caviar Ltd, his preposterously named offshore company in Jersey, all set up to deposit his ill-gotten gains, if it wasn't for the diligent and painstaking work of a tribunal with the powers of the High Court.
Yet the suspicions about Mr Burke were so strong throughout his lengthy political career that more than a few eyebrows were raised when the Taoiseach appointed him as Minister for Foreign Affairs in June, 1997. Mr Ahern had heard the stories too, but went ahead after conducting the most perfunctory inquiry into Mr James Gogarty's allegations.
Every tree in north Dublin may have been climbed, but nobody acting on the Taoiseach's behalf spoke to Mr Gogarty himself. Had that been done, Mr Burke might have been left to languish on the back benches. But he had long been part of Mr Ahern's circle, along with Mr P.J. Mara, and the Taoiseach is loyal to a fault to his friends. The problem is that some of them are not as "honourable" as he would like to think.