Sir, – Frank McDonald's opinion piece concerning my former client, the late George Redmond, under the heading "One of the most corrupt public officials in Irish history" (February 20th), is long on self-serving vitriol, short on evidence supporting such a sweeping claim, manipulative of the facts and replete with serious inaccuracies.
Leaving aside its personalised abuse, its central themes – that George was complicit in Dublin’s frenzy of dubious rezonings and that he subverted its proper planning and development – are patent nonsense.
First, council officials have no function in land rezoning. This is the exclusive preserve of councillors and was pursued with gusto by the main political parties in an unholy acre-for-acre arrangement.
Second, when in Dublin Corporation’s planning department, George was an administrator and not a planner, and when he later became assistant county and city manager, the one function he did not have was that of planning. So if he was responsible for undermining Dublin’s planning system, he could only have achieved this as part of a cabal of corrupt officials. But who and where are these officials? Certainly the planning tribunal unearthed none of them.
In fact, that inquiry was able to identify little corrupt that George had done other than Justice Feargus Flood’s early findings based on the evidence of James Gogarty. Even with what we knew then, Gogarty’s credibility was evaporating with each passing day, but despite the mountain of contrary evidence from several credible sources, Flood found for Gogarty, concluding that all others had conspired to deceive him.
What we didn’t know then was that Gogarty’s credibility had been bolstered by the concealment of what the Supreme Court later described as “explosive” evidence. Once that became known, Flood’s findings began to unravel and, if media reports are to be believed, that process continues apace.
There was much else due to be aired in George’s High Court challenge which never emerged when, after years of trying to stop the case reaching the courts, the tribunal capitulated and agreed to the High Court quashing Flood’s key findings. Of course, none of this suits the media narrative engendered by the tribunal’s deliberations.
When the history of this tribunal is written, there will surely be a chapter on the sheep-like, blinkered groupthink of the reporting media. And Frank McDonald’s assertion that the withdrawal of Flood’s Gogarty findings was “due to a technical legal flaw in the way it conducted its findings” shows that some blinkered ones are still alive and well.
This is not an attempt – as Gogarty quipped as I cross-examined him in 1999 – to canonise George. He was a man who clearly had been on the take and has carried the answers to many questions about his activities to the grave.When – surely much to the tribunal’s relief – he settled his case, he didn’t claim vindication, as asserted, save in respect of the way he had been treated.
To the many councillors who should have endured more of the tribunal’s attention, he must have been a welcome distraction. To Flood, who famously described him as a “red apple in a barrel”, he was a godsend.
Once rumbled, he co-operated with the tribunal and with the Criminal Assets Bureau, he had to sell his house and surrender his “savings” to pay his tax, and he endured public opprobrium unprecedented in the State’s history.
He said himself in the witness box: “I took the money . . . It was a sword of Damocles. I lived with that sword over my head and it obviously has ruined my life.” He always disputed Gogarty’s claims. I, for one, believe him. – Yours, etc,
ANTHONY HARRIS,
Dublin 6.