The Deep Throat emigrant who doomed Bertie Ahern and exposed political corruption

Investigative journalist reveals who broke story on corruption in highest levels

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Former Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern during the launch of his autobiography at Mansion House in Dublin.

Photo by Niall Carson/PA Wire

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Frank Connolly was the journalist who originally broke the story about corruption at the highest level in Irish politics. He  was vilified and threatened, but now the Mahon report has confirmed his findings about what he first wrote about in 1999. Here is his expose on how it all came about.

The key to unlocking the door to the endemic corruption  in Ireland was provided by Sligo native, Tom Gilmartin, who emigrated to England in 1957 where he developed a successful mechanical engineering business. When he witnessed the homeless Irish arriving in Luton, where he lived with his wife and family, during the recession of the 1980’s he decided to return to Ireland to try and generate employment with two ambitious retail projects.

With a £20 million investment fund promised by English investors and independent wealth from his successful enterprises, Gilmartin sought to build a large shopping development at Bachelors Walk in Dublin’s city centre while he also began to assemble lands at Quarryvale at a strategic junction where the main route to the west of Ireland converged with the M50 ring road around the city. His success in assembling the Quarryvale lands attracted the interest of the country’s largest bank, Allied Irish Bank and one of its favoured clients the Cork property developer and politically well connected, Owen O’Callaghan.

When I first spoke to Gilmartin in 1998, he told me that as soon as he sought to get his plans off the ground he was confronted, in 1988, with outrageous demands for money from another Fianna Fáil politician, the late Liam Lawlor and a senior official in City Hall, George Redmond.

After he refused to pay the £100,000 each they demanded he discovered that he was meeting commercially draining, bureaucratic and political obstacles at every turn.

After a meeting with the then prime minister, Charles Haughey and a group of cabinet ministers in Government buildings in Leinster House in February 1989, he was approached outside the door by a man who gave him a piece of paper with the code number of an offshore bank account in the British controlled tax haven, the Isle of Man, and asked to lodge £5 million.

“You make the f…… mafia look like monks,” Gilmartin told the hustler.

When he complained about all of these obstacles to Padraig Flynn the then environment minister asked him to make a donation to Fianna Fáil. Just leave the payee blank, Flynn told him. Instead of going to Fianna Fáil the £50,000 donation ended up in Flynn’s bank accounts and a portion was used by his wife to buy a farm in county Mayo.

When Gilmartin went to the police to have them investigate he was called by a man purporting to be a senior officer and told to “feck off back to England.” The police investigation file from 1989 exonerated the politicians and officials, including Lawlor, who has since been jailed on three occasions for failing to comply with tribunal court orders. He died in a car accident in Moscow in 2005 while still under tribunal investigation after it discovered he had opened more than a hundred bank accounts in numerous jurisdictions. Lawlor had previously been appointed by Bertie Ahern as chairman of the Irish parliament’s ethics committee.

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