Exposed: Scandals that Rocked the Irish State

EXPOSED

Frank Connolly is an investigative journalist and author who lives in Dublin. His work with The Sunday Business Post contributed to the establishment of tribunals of inquiry into planning and police corruption in Ireland. He has published a number of bestselling non-fiction books, including Tom Gilmartin: The Man Who Brought Down a Taoiseach (2014), NAMA-Land (2017), United Nation: The Case for Integrating Ireland (2022) and The Christy Moore Songbook (1984). He has also published a novel set against the background of the Dublin bombings in 1974, A Conspiracy of Lies (2019).

EXPOSED

SCANDALS THAT ROCKED THE IRISH STATE

To the victims of ruthless power and live-streamed genocide and all those who continue to seek truth, justice and freedom in these dark and dangerous times.

Prologue

AFTER A LONG HOT DAY HELPING voters to the polling stations, Bertie Ahern was looking forward to a cold pint. At the bar of The Goose Tavern in north Dublin, he joined his team in sinking the first of the night. It was general election day, Friday, 6 June 1997, and he had a good chance of becoming taoiseach, the political leader of the country, following the count the next day. From the bar, he nodded and beckoned me over. I said it looked like he was going to win and form a government. Cautious but quietly confident, he said he hoped so.

He wanted to know more about a story I had been investigating for The Sunday Business Post over recent months and years. It involved Ray Burke, a prominent member of his front bench and likely Cabinet minister in what would be Ahern’s first government as taoiseach. It concerned an alleged payment of up to £80,000 to Burke by two businessmen eight years earlier, during the 1989 general election.

I told ‘the Bert’, as he was known to his circle of friends and political mates, that if he wanted to know more, he should take a trip out to Sutton, some three miles away, to meet Jim Gogarty, the man who claimed to have witnessed the bribe. I told him that Gogarty had a room full of files to back up his story.

‘I won’t have a fucking Michael Lowry in my Cabinet,’ said Ahern. Lowry was a Fine Gael minister in the outgoing coalition government who had resigned from office in November 1996 following allegations that he accepted improper donations. He was later embroiled in a series of controversies relating to large and improper payments and other benefits

that the Moriarty Tribunal found him to have received from two of the country’s richest men, Ben Dunne and Denis O’Brien. By June 1997, he was a pariah, and a symbol of the political and corporate corruption that Ahern had so often decried on his long and winding road to power.

Nothing in our brief conversation would have surprised Ahern, as prior to the election I had spoken at length to his party strategist and handler, the legendary P.J. Mara, about the financial contributions made to Burke during the June 1989 general election campaign. Mara confirmed ‘off the record’ to me that Burke may have received ‘political donations’ at the time, but he denied there was anything improper about the circumstances and warned that if I published otherwise it could lead to unfortunate consequences for The Sunday Business Post. Over previous months, Burke and his press handler had denied that he received any payments in return for political favours and threatened legal action if we said anything to the contrary.

Following our brief engagement in The Goose Tavern, I was left with the impression that Ahern knew a lot more than he let on but had wanted to hear what I was prepared to divulge. There was no doubt in my mind that the ‘most skilful, the most devious, and the most cunning of them all’, as Charles Haughey once described Ahern, would be a formidable and dangerous adversary for anyone who crossed him. But I was prepared to take that risk. After all, that was my job.

Introduction

FROM THE LATE 1980S, THE IRISH establishment and successive governments were rocked by a series of political scandals that started with Charles J. Haughey’s term as taoiseach and continued to the resignation of Bertie Ahern from that role in 2008. They were tumultuous times, during much of which I was working as a journalist with The Sunday Business Post (1993–2002), Ireland on Sunday (2002–4), Village magazine (2006–7) and The Irish Mail on Sunday (2007–8). The investigations I carried out, along with my colleagues, would lead to the establishment of two tribunals of inquiry and expose the corrupt practices that characterised the leadership and actions of the mainly Fianna Fáil-led governments over those twenty years.

The fallout from what went on during those years is still being felt today, particularly in the shortage and cost of housing. It was this, along with the key role played by Michael Lowry in the formation of the coalition government following the general election of November 2024, that inspired me to write this book. A former Fine Gael minister, Lowry was a central focus of the ‘Tribunal of Inquiry into certain Payments to Politicians and Related Matters’ (commonly known as the Moriarty Tribunal), which was established in September 1997 to investigate payments made to him and to Charles Haughey by prominent businessmen, including Ben Dunne. In 2011, Fianna Fáil leader and later Taoiseach Micheál Martin called for Lowry’s resignation and his removal from political life, following publication of the findings of the Moriarty Tribunal. Yet in 2025 the same Micheál Martin accepted

the support of Lowry and other regional independent TDs to form a coalition government with them and Fine Gael. So, it seemed like an appropriate time to revisit what had happened during those times from my particular and unique perspective.

This book follows my investigations into corruption allegations and how they resulted in the resignation and disgrace of a series of senior politicians, including Ray Burke, Pádraig Flynn, Liam Lawlor and, eventually, Bertie Ahern, as well as uncovering their benefactors in the business community. The seeds of the banking and property collapse of 2008 were sown in the policies pursued by successive governments that fed the boom-and-bust economic cycle. They were nurtured by the improper and self-serving relationships between developers, builders, bankers and the politicians and parties they financed and supported. Their misdeeds were enabled by the failure of those responsible for the regulation of the banking, corporate, political and policing authorities. The book also examines how members of the Garda Síochána engaged in criminal behaviour that led to a series of wrongful arrests, harassment and abuse of citizens across a north-western division of the force in the 1990s.

It is my aim with this book to inform readers about illicit business practices and poor governance that have enriched the few, widened inequality and failed to provide the infrastructure, climate protection measures and public services that citizens are entitled to expect from their government. To do so, I concentrate on my investigations into planning and Garda corruption in the 1990s and 2000s, during which time I worked with many excellent journalists, editors, production and other staff in various newspapers and media organisations. In Ireland, a generation has been denied the right to decent, secure and affordable homes due to the State’s failure. The roots of today’s housing crisis stem from the negligence and greed of those powerful political and business interests who are the subject of this book. The words of Ciara Mary-Alice

Thompson (CMAT), in her song ‘Euro-Country’, capture the human cost of this corruption:

All the big boys, all the Berties

All the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me

I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me

And it was normal, building houses

That stay empty even now, yeah

And no one says it out loud but I know it can be better if we hound it.

I hope that this work will help to explain how and why so much pain was inflicted on so many, and in some small way help to ensure that the ‘big boys’ do not always win.

PART I

Chapter One Will We, Fuck!

JIM GOGARTY, FROM KELLS IN COUNTY Meath, was a former chairman and managing director of Joseph Murphy Structural Engineers (JMSE) based in Santry, Dublin. He left the company following a bitter row with his employer. Born in 1917, he served in the Garda Síochána reserve in the 1940s, before training as an engineer and working in construction. For over twenty years, he was a loyal enforcer for Joe Murphy senior, a tough operator from Kerry, who made big money with his brother John in Britain’s post-war construction boom.

Gogarty spent his final years in the company in a fierce battle with Murphy, trying to get what he believed was his due in promised pension entitlements. When an advertisement was published in The Irish Times in 1995 offering a reward for anyone who could provide information leading to a criminal conviction for planning corruption, he seized the opportunity. The reward of £10,000 was posted by Newry solicitor Kevin Neary on behalf of environmentalists and lawyers Michael Smith and Colm MacEochaidh, who were members of An Taisce, the heritage protection group. They were frustrated at what they considered to be widescale corruption involving public officials, politicians and businessmen in planning and zoning decisions across the country.

They were not disappointed. A total of fifty-five complainants came forward, including Gogarty, the seventy-eight-year-old then living in Sutton in north Dublin.

The first news story relating to the complaints sent to Neary was printed by The Sunday Business Post on 9 July 1995 and written by reporter Marion McKeone, who gave a brief outline of Gogarty’s complaint, which had been provided to her by the two lawyers but without meeting the source.1 She told me that Ray Burke was the politician involved. I wanted to follow up on the story, as I had previously investigated Burke in relation to planning and zoning controversies for Magill magazine in the late 1980s. McKeone introduced me to Smith and MacEochaidh, and, through them, I made direct contact with Gogarty. We agreed to meet in the Newry offices of solicitors Donnelly Neary & Donnelly, where he set out the conditions attached to any future co-operation.

Gogarty told me he had previously been let down by journalists who had abused his trust and, on occasion, misrepresented the facts he presented to them. It took a while to convince him that I would not publish any material he provided to me without his consent, and for him to accept that anything I did reveal would have to be verified and supported by documentation. During an hour-long discussion, he disclosed enough to convince me that he had a story to tell that implicated Burke, Gogarty’s former employers and builder Michael Bailey in a blatant act of bribery and corruption.

It took a number of meetings at Gogarty’s home for me to acquire a deeper understanding of his complaints and of his character. A cantankerous man at times, he was angry and understandably bitter, mostly against his former employers, but also against those in political and media circles, as well as in the police, who had failed to act on his complaints and to deal with the threats and intimidation to which he was subjected in his efforts to secure his pension rights. He also had an impish sense of humour, was self-deprecating and fully aware that he was, at the very least, partially complicit in the act of bribery he witnessed in Burke’s home.

On 13 August 1995, I reported further details of the complaints sent to Neary in a piece that asserted ‘a coalition politician and three former

Fianna Fáil office holders are among those accused of accepting payoffs in exchange for assisting with land rezoning applications in Dublin’.2 The coalition politician was a prominent member of Fine Gael, the largest party of the ‘Rainbow’ government that included the Labour Party and Democratic Left. ‘While the complaints do not exclusively concern land rezonings in Dublin, the most prominent politicians implicated are from constituencies in the capital, where most of the planning controversies of recent years have taken place,’ the story continued.

Kevin Neary had told me that some of the replies to the advertisement were ‘very credible’ and would probably stand up in court, and that the sponsors of the reward wanted then Minister for Justice Nora Owen to instruct the attorney general ‘to consider how best immunity from prosecution might be facilitated for those offering information on corruption’.

In order to reassure Gogarty about my intentions to pursue his claims energetically, the Post published a further story on 3 September stating, somewhat presciently, that the ‘Corruption exposures may need inquiry’. This followed discussions with Smith and MacEochaidh, who were seeking an independent investigation, and with the Dublin NorthEast Labour Party TD Tommy Broughan, who took an active interest in the corruption allegations and met with myself and Gogarty, one of his constituents.

Gogarty was in poor health and lived with his wife, Anna, with whom he had raised seven children in Shielmartin Road in Sutton, north Dublin. Anna was friendly, hospitable and patiently supportive of her husband when we met at their home, which was close to Howth Head with a view over Dublin Bay. A large front room contained a table covered with boxes full of documents relating to Gogarty’s years of employment as chairman and managing director of JMSE. His anger with his former boss and company founder, Joseph Murphy senior, was evident and based largely on his grievances over the manner in which his

pension arrangements had been handled by the firm. His main concern was how Anna, some twenty years younger than him, would manage after his death.

He wanted the full truth of his alleged mistreatment by Murphy senior over his pension and other entitlements to be exposed. He described threats and intimidation suffered at the hands of Joseph Murphy junior, who succeeded his father as managing director of the company. Gogarty claimed that these were not properly investigated by the gardaí. Crucially, he also recounted how he witnessed Ray Burke being bribed in 1989 and had retained evidence of fraud, breaches of currency regulations and tax evasion by Murphy senior and his companies, which, he maintained, were part of the culture at JMSE.

After examining and discussing these records at his home, I put it to Gogarty that the best way to ensure that his financial concerns were addressed and his mistreatment by his former employers properly investigated was through exposing the political corruption he witnessed in the home of the politician. I cautioned that it could take many months to achieve results, not least due to the potential legal obstacles we would face from Burke, the Murphys and other politicians and public servants who were implicated in the wrongdoing.

Gradually, and with the benefit of a sharp memory, Gogarty outlined in meticulous detail the circumstances surrounding the meeting in Burke’s home in Swords, Dublin, in June 1989, during which the politician was given two envelopes containing a total of £80,000. Also present, he said, were Joseph Murphy junior and Michael Bailey of building firm Bovale Developments. The money was paid to Burke in exchange for his assistance with the rezoning of lands in north Dublin.

Gogarty had been asked by Murphy senior to go to Burke’s home in his capacity as chairman of JMSE and ‘to keep an eye’ on his son. Bailey drove them from Santry to Swords in his dark grey Mercedes. On the way, Gogarty asked him whether they would get a receipt for

the payment from the politician. ‘Will we, fuck!’ was the colourful reply from the builder.

Mick Bailey hailed from Roscommon, and, with his brother Tom, started work in Dublin as a bricklayer, going on to create a successful house-building business. The name of their firm, Bovale Developments, was derived from their homeplace Boho and Tom’s wife’s townland of Glenvale, also in Roscommon. By 1996, Bovale Developments was building up to 150 semi-detached houses a year, mainly in the Swords area, with an annual turnover of £10 million. A big man, rough and ready, and with hands like shovels, Mick Bailey courted public officials, politicians, bankers and anyone else who could advance the interests of his construction company. He owned a large home in Batterstown, County Meath, and several racehorses, and he rode out with the Ward Union Hunt. He famously celebrated a bet that scooped him £50,000 at Cheltenham by jumping into the winner’s enclosure, where he kissed the Queen Mother and was promptly seized by the police.3 Bailey was a member of Burke’s constituency organisation and a generous contributor to Fianna Fáil.

A year before this meeting with Burke, at Murphy senior’s request, Gogarty had negotiated the sale of JMSE land at Forest Road in Swords with Bailey. In early 1989, Murphy senior told Gogarty he wanted to sell off the remainder of the company’s land bank in north Dublin and he approached Bailey once again. Murphy was anxious to dispose of the land urgently due to an internal company dispute, but he wanted to maximise its value before he did so. This would require ‘political support’, which Bailey could deliver. In the weeks before Burke was approached by Bailey, a deal was hammered out. It was agreed that Bovale would either buy all the land or take a 50 per cent stake in it if Bailey could ‘procure’ its rezoning from agricultural to residential use, thus multiplying its value before the sale. A letter to this effect, providing details of every plot and folio in the 720-acre land bank, was drawn up by Bailey in advance of the meeting with Burke.

The payments to the powerful politician in north Dublin were intended to smooth the path to the ultimate rezoning of the lands for large-scale housing development. When they arrived at Briargate, the large, detached house on the Malahide Road in Swords where Burke lived, Gogarty had a copy of the document containing the proposal agreed with Bailey and the location of the lands, which stretched across a large part of the politician’s Dublin constituency.

During the meeting, Bailey and Murphy junior each handed the politician an envelope which, as agreed, contained sums of £40,000. In the case of Murphy junior, it was £30,000 in cash and a cheque for £10,000. According to Gogarty, he had been at a meeting at the JMSE offices in Santry earlier in the day when the cash contribution for Burke was counted and placed in the envelope along with the cheque. Frank Reynolds, another director of the firm, was involved in gathering the money.

Burke accepted both envelopes, which he placed in a drawer. When Gogarty offered him the document containing the details and location of the lands, Burke replied that he had already received a copy from Bailey. A busy man, he was in a hurry to end the meeting. It was only a week or so before the general election, and he had a lot of homes to canvass and hands to shake. He mentioned that he had a television interview to do and ushered his generous donors out the door in quick time.

Over subsequent meetings at his home, Gogarty gave me access to extensive documentation concerning his involvement with JMSE and payments made to others by the company. Among the recipients was George Redmond, the powerful assistant city and county manager for the greater Dublin area. If proven, Gogarty’s claims had the potential to open a Pandora’s box of planning irregularities in the expanding city and expose the role of elected councillors and TDs, as well as local authority officials, in suspect planning and rezoning decisions. The failure to enforce accepted standards and regulations would have a

direct impact on the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers.

Inevitably, Gogarty’s version of events would be disputed by the other parties he named, but, for now, it was a story as big as anything the Post had printed since the paper was first published in 1989, the same year as the substantial handover in Burke’s house took place. Over the following months, we reported on Gogarty’s claims without naming him, his former employers or the politician. Gogarty was not inclined to come forward publicly at this time.

On 31 March 1996, a lead article provided detail on the payments made in Burke’s home in June 1989. It described how ‘a source’ told the Post that he was present when a senior politician was given ‘cash and cheques’ to the value of £40,000 during 1989, and that a property developer handed over an equivalent sum to the politician on the same occasion. The story went on to highlight the source’s claim that he was subjected to threatening phone calls, attacks and intimidation at his home, which the gardaí had failed to investigate properly. His solicitors confirmed that they had sent details of the allegations to Minister for Justice Nora Owen, a Fine Gael TD for the same north Dublin constituency that Burke represented.

On the same page it was reported how JMSE had provided crucial materials for the controversial nuclear power plant at Sellafield, on the west coast of England.4 Only those who knew the details of the alleged payments to Burke referred to in the lead story would have realised the significance of that detail. The decision to run the two apparently unrelated reports together was intended to increase the pressure on Burke and Fianna Fáil, as well as JMSE, in relation to the growing political controversy, without facing legal action. The result was that the Post was sent letters by solicitors representing Burke and JMSE warning the paper not to identify their clients in any reporting or it would face defamation proceedings.

In response to the article, then Minister for Labour Bertie Ahern commented that the reported allegations of planning payoffs should be dealt with by the Garda authorities, while senior Fianna Fáil sources insisted that the party would ‘forcefully deal with any of its members who are shown to be implicated in any political corruption’.5 These remarks were published in a follow-up article in the Post alongside fresh allegations of irregular payments to Burke from a separate, unnamed source. They resulted from a call to me from Jim Geraghty, a former Fianna Fáil councillor in Dublin County Council, who had served during Burke’s two terms as chairman of the council in 1985 and 1986. He claimed that he had witnessed cash payments to Burke on two separate occasions.

From Rush in north Dublin, Geraghty had been among those who came forward with information to the Newry solicitor a year earlier, and, after months of discussion, he agreed to make a signed affidavit for the Post containing his sensational claims before they were aired on 7 April 1996. He did not want to be identified in the article for fear of recrimination against himself, his family and his business, or even to be described as a former public representative.

Headed ‘Fianna Fáil will deal forcefully with corruption’, the article reminded readers of the allegation by Gogarty that Burke (both unnamed) was handed £80,000 in exchange for assistance with the rezoning of hundreds of acres of land in north Dublin, which ‘would be achieved over a period of years at a cost to the developers of £1,000 an acre in payoffs’. Readers were informed that, ‘The developer who organised the meeting indicated that the politician was anxious to get the money urgently to cover election costs. The payments were partly intended to cover the payment to other named councillors who would support the zoning motions, he says.’ The article then described how Geraghty, who was not known to Gogarty, witnessed two payments to the politician in Burke’s office in Dublin County Council on O’Connell Street in the city centre:

I was with [name excluded] when this man came in. He had a carrier bag with him and he left it on the table. I walked out. When I left, I realised that I had left my briefcase behind me. I went back into the office. The guy had the bag opened. I saw bundles of cash, Irish currency, in it. The man with the bag had his back to me. As I walked in, he said: ‘There is 60 grand there.’

Geraghty first thought it may have been a development contribution but then realised that such payments are made to the relevant department of the local authority. This was not the only such payment he witnessed:

On another occasion I was with [Burke’s name excluded] and somebody came in, a man, with a plastic bag which he handed to [name excluded] and said: ‘There is what we agreed on. Do you want to check it?’ [Name excluded] said: ‘No, it is ok.’ You could see the notes through the bag although there would not have been as much there as on the other occasion. That time the bag was practically full, stuffed with notes. It is only in later years that I began to realise that I had probably witnessed two irregularities.

The following week another story expanded on the involvement of JMSE in the supply of materials for nuclear installations in Britain. A State property controlled by the Office of Public Works in Dublin was used to store steel for the company, which was intended for the Sellafield plant during the 1980s. Sellafield was previously called Windscale, but the name had been changed following a disastrous fire at the plant in the late 1950s that had carried radioactive material across the Irish Sea, subsequently blamed for causing cancer clusters along the north-east coast of Ireland.

In late spring 1996, I met with senior executives of JMSE at their offices in Santry, who denied knowledge of any political payments to Ray

Burke. Burke himself maintained a self-enforced silence, despite a series of questions from the Post relating to the Gogarty allegation. It was not the first time that the north Dublin politician had been embroiled in allegations of bribery, and he had developed a thick skin when it came to adverse media attention.

Burke grew up in a house attached to St Ita’s psychiatric hospital in Portrane, County Dublin, where his father worked as a nurse, while also serving as a TD. P.J. ‘Paddy’ Burke came from farming stock in Kilmeena, near Westport in County Mayo, and he was first elected to the Dáil in 1943, the year his son Raphael was born. Paddy Burke, known as the ‘Bishop’ due to the number of funerals he attended in his north Dublin constituency, was still a serving Fianna Fáil TD and councillor when Ray was first elected to Dublin County Council in 1967. By this time, the younger Burke, then just twenty-four, had set up his own estate agency, PJ Burke (Sales) Ltd, named after his father.

On Paddy Burke’s retirement in 1973, his seat passed to his son following that year’s general election. Ray inherited the friends and acquaintances his father had nurtured during his five decades as a TD, including many from the west of Ireland. The Burkes were joined at the hip to Tom Brennan and Joe McGowan, whose company, Brennan & McGowan, was among the most successful housebuilders across Dublin county and beyond. Ray Burke’s estate agency sold the houses that Brennan & McGowan built across north Dublin, earning some £85,000, over £1,000 a month, between 1972 and 1982 from commission on the sales. Brennan & McGowan raised an estimated £150,000 in finance for ‘Mr Burke and Fianna Fáil’ between 1972 and 1984, although it appears that little, if any of it went into the party coffers.6

In 1974, Oak Park, a company which Brennan & McGowan partowned, purchased two acres of land in Swords for £7,000. The land was acquired from Joseph Coleman, a patient and ward of court in St Ita’s, where Paddy Burke was employed. Coleman later died in St Brendan’s

psychiatric hospital in Dublin. Brennan & McGowan built the large house ‘Briargate’ on the site, which was gifted to Burke by his father as a wedding present, although it was not registered in his name until many years later. Questions were raised in the late 1970s and 1980s about Burke’s acquisition of this house, along with other unusual financial dealings with the builders, which became the subject of a Garda investigation. Burke admitted that he was questioned on a number of occasions by gardaí about his relationship with Brennan & McGowan, as well as certain zoning decisions he supported, but he dismissed allegations of improper behaviour out of hand. However, they never went away.

In 1987, I had interviewed him for Magill about some of the controversial votes and his appointment of his close advisor, Tony Lambert, and other associates to An Bord Pleanála, the planning appeals board, when he was minister for environment some years earlier. Now, almost ten years later I was on his trail again.