2018

From our March 2018 edition. If a tree falls in an empty forest does it make a sound: if a gun shot is fired in a building can it not be heard, especially when people are in and near that building? This is something that has puzzled me regarding the death of a Garda Sergeant, Michael Galvin, a former captain and manager of Sligo hurling team, and a father of three who lived in Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim. He died on 28 May 2015. I heard on local radio that morning that a man had earlier been found dead at Ballyshannon Garda Station. The first thought I had was it would be Michael Galvin: WHY? Because I always believed he would become a Garda Whistleblower. I could see from dealings I had with him, that he wanted a more open and transparent Garda Síochána. I had met Garda Sergeant Michael Galvin many times over the years. He came across as an honest, compassionate, straightforward and helpful Garda, who would fight any implications of wrongdoing. He appeared tenacious and I recall him saying, “it will be a long time before I retire”. Sergeant Galvin took statements in relation to Councillor Sean McEniff and others’ alleged incitements to hatred in 2013 after a home proposed for a Travelling family was burnt to the ground at Parkhill in the town. Michael Galvin took his own life with a hand gun after being subjected to a Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) investigation. Under Section 102 of the Garda Ombudsman Act, the Garda Commissioner forwards any case of a Garda death to GSOC for investigation. Three gardaí, including Sergeant Galvin, were being investigated after the death of 33-year-old Sheena Stewart on 1 January 2015 after a night out in Bundoran, Co Donegal, when she was struck, while intoxicated, by a taxi. It is understood the sergeant had driven past her before the accident as he responded to another call At his funeral his widow, Colette Galvin, revealed he had been in deep personal turmoil over the investigation. Sergeant Galvin told GSOC the woman had been on the pavement rather than the road when he passed her at the scene.  However, an apparent discrepancy arose between that evidence and the CCTV footage of the incident. A Judicial inquiry under Judge Frank Clarke, now Chief justice, looked into the GSOC investigation. The Inquiry found that GSOC should not have instigated a criminal investigation though it had done so in good faith because it was practice to do so in any case where there had been a death. Sergeant Galvin only found out about the investigation three months after it had been instigated, because of deletion by Garda of a key email. Judge Clarke found that the practice of gardaí imparting the news a colleague was being investigated needed to be changed so that GSOC did it. An email from GSOC’s lawyer to its Investigating Officer the morning of the suicide had confirmed that though there was insufficient evidence of commission of a crime the file should be forwarded to the DPP. Sergeant Galvin never got to hear this news. The spin from the Garda Síochána was that GSOC was responsible for Sergeant Galvin’s untimely death – and the inquiry did express concern about how GSOC informed the press after his death about its investigations into him, before his family was aware of the status of those investigations. However, the inquiry noted that the Garda were confused about, and suspicious of, the role of GSOC, and that they had been confused as to whether GSOC’s investigation was criminal in nature and had therefore inappropriately taken uncautioned statements from their three colleagues in the gardaí. GSOC practices changed after the Clarke inquiry. Its chairperson said that it would improve its communication with gardaí and it prepared a set of information leaflets for gardaí on how such investigations should progress. But where are the Garda Síochána changes? Certainly suspicion of GSOC has been acute since its formation. This was symptomised in the vehemence of suspicions that gardaí bugged GSOC headquarters which led to the inconclusive 2014 Cooke inquiry. After this the Garda Commissioner, Noirin O’Sullivan admitted a more constructive relationship between Garda and GSOC was required. But the problems survive the Clarke inquiry. In 2016 Judge Mary Ellen Ring Chairperson of GSOC berated the time the Garda take to furnish documents to GSOC and the absence of sanctions for reticent gardaí. On 1 March 2018 Judge Ring suggested that the Garda attitude towards GSOC is “we get it, when we get it”. She bemoaned the fact there is no penalty if gardaí do not comply. Government is unenthusiastic about GSOC. This year, 2018, GSOC have sought 37 extra staff but on 25 February the Minister for Justice, Charlie Flanagan, said only five staff will in fact be provided. More generally, the failure to implement the recommendations of the Morris report on the gardai in Donegal, and indeed anecdotes from the streets, suggest that in forty years nothing much has changed in the Donegal Garda. I was in fact reminded of Sergeant Galvin’s death by news of the suicide of Detective Superintendent Colm Fox – lead detective in the Regency murder trial also in a Garda Station, Ballymun, on February 10. Michael Galvin also reminded me of another Garda, Michael Lawless, who made written complaints about the untouchables in Donegal and the close relationship between Senior Garda and Sean McEniff. Garda Lawless specifically complained that gardaí were being hindered by Senior Garda in carrying out their duties. As long ago as 1985 an RTÉ ‘Today Tonight’ focused on Law and Order in South Donegal, particularly Seán McEniff’s gaming. Donegal County Council sued RTÉ for defamation for what it said about the inappropriate relationship between Donegal County Council and the Garda but a legal settlement saw it agree to remove the programme, on the steps of the High Court. In 2014 when Sean McEniff appeared to assault a female Councillor Senior Garda would not prosecute

It is not a question of whether there was a Garda smear campaign against Sergeant Maurice McCabe. Rather, it is a matter of who planned and orchestrated it. For the first time since his prolonged agony began in 2008, McCabe was given the opportunity to speak publicly of his mistreatment by Garda management and some of his colleagues when he gave evidence at the Disclosures Tribunal in Dublin Castle on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th March last. It was not new but it was devastating. Leave aside the inevitable conflicts and confusion that have emerged as to what instructions the former Garda commissioners, Martin Callinan and Noirin O’Sullivan, did or did not make in order to discredit McCabe. The simple fact is that McCabe was the victim of a culture within the force that does down any member who does not abide by its code of loyalty. Not loyalty to the truth or the uniform but to protecting their own at all costs. When it came to speaking out about the abuse of the penalty points system by probably hundreds of gardaí, from the rank of commissioner down, McCabe crossed the thin blue line. His efforts to highlight the fact that members routinely cancelled penalty points for family, friends, politicians, journalists and Garda colleagues lit the fuse which ultimately led to a systematic campaign to destroy his career and his life. It is not so long ago that a garda who reported or charged another member for drink driving was committing a hangable offence, for the one doing his duty. It was beyond the bounds as it meant that the guilty drunkard would inevitably lose his job on conviction. So it did not happen. In McCabe’s case, when he discovered how the internal Garda computer system, Pulse, was regularly abused to destroy evidence which could otherwise lead to the conviction of hundreds or thousands of people for drink driving or other offences, he became the target. He was wrongly accused of failing to detain a man who went on to commit murder. He was blamed for disclosing a litany of failures by gardaí in the station in Bailieborough County Cavan when he was sergeant in charge in 2007. As was his duty, he had informed his district officer, Superintendent Mick Clancy, about the low standards of policing at his station and in particular the failure of members to investigate crimes, to execute warrants or to keep proper files. He found himself accused of heinous crimes including the sexual abuse of the daughter of a colleague. When he was cleared of this charge on the instruction of the DPP, he found that it resurfaced time and again, not least whenever he blew the whistle on wrong doing within the force. He found that complaints he was making to more senior officers were not being accurately reported and, in some cases, clearly distorted. On one notable occasion a reference he made to making a complaint “to Clancy” was wrongly described by an officer as McCabe making a complaint “against Clancy”. If he had not secretly taped this meeting with then Inspector, now Superintendent, Noel Cunningham, he would have been, in his own words, “buried”. When he brought his concerns to the confidential Garda recipient who was expected to deal with such matters ‘confidentially’, all hell broke loose. It was then that the orchestrated campaign against him commenced from the very top. It may be a coincidence that among those who, it is alleged, had their penalty points quashed was Martin Callinan, who, it is claimed, was determined to “bury” McCabe. Another was the Irish Independent journalist, Paul Williams who, in April 2014, revived the story of McCabe’s alleged abuse of a garda colleague’s daughter which the DPP had dismissed back in 2006. Williams was among those named in the Dáil as having had his penalty points quashed. Worse still, Callinan was accused of suggesting that McCabe had sexually abused his own children. Callinan had described the whistleblowing of McCabe and another garda, John Wilson, as “disgusting” behaviour when the then commissioner appeared before the Public Accounts Committee in January 2014. The following day Callinan met PAC chairman, John McGuinness TD, in the car park of the Red Cow hotel on the Naas Road in Dublin where the commissioner said, according to the politician, that McCabe couldn’t be trusted and had abused his own children and his nieces. In 2016, the former Garda press officer, Dave Taylor, told McCabe that he had been instructed by Callinan to destroy him by leaking the false child sexual-abuse claims far and wide. “He has to be buried”, Callinan had told Taylor. Then assistant commissioner, Noirin O’Sullivan was the “pusher” of this strategy. That is what McCabe claims he was told by Taylor. Taylor appears to have retracted some of his claims while McGuinness is supporting McCabe’s sensational allegations against Callinan. The smear campaign which was known to politicians, journalists and many members of the Garda, happened. It only remains to be seen who was ultimately responsible for it.   By Frank Connolly.

Nama was inevitably going to be controversial. Set up to acquire loans from the Irish banks that had recklessly provided the finance for an almighty property boom and needing to be rescued when the inevitable happened, Nama was the vehicle created to work through getting some of the money back. In 2009 the property market in Ireland had more than crashed, it had ceased. With no credit available from broken banks , many businesses in existential trouble and incomes squeezed by higher taxes and government cutbacks, a shock hit the economy denuding the resources and confidence needed for property transactions. The concept behind Nama was to take the time to deal with the property issues and avoid all the collateral supporting bank loans becoming valueless in a market with no buyers. Time and a structured approach would allow the physical property assets backing the toxic loans to be sold in a recovering property market and mitigate losses. So called ‘bad banks’ had been established elsewhere in the wake of property busts but nothing on the scale of Nama. If the market was to get going again to facilitate this strategy, it would need brave foreign investment. In crisis there is always opportunity for some, and there are organisations whose very reason to exist is to exploit misfortune. It was Nama’s job to create the conditions where these organizations could come to Ireland and buy. In a great read about what happened as Nama did the necessary, Frank Connolly’s book ‘Namaland’ [Gill 2017: €16.99] does a good job of telling the story so far. Connolly states in the introduction that it did not work as planned and the book sets out to show that. Nama is seen as a secretive defensive organisation with an unwillingness to allow a sufficient degree of scrutiny, and there is a sense that it therefore must be hiding skeletons. Secrecy was always going to be part of the Nama story however, and no account could be as revealing as many who buy this book in the hope of exposures would like. Lending agreements are confidential and borrowers are entitled to their privacy even when loans are distressed. The business of Nama was inevitably going to be veiled, and full transparency was never going to be a feature of the deals Nama did. This in itself created a suspicion and a curiosity. Using journalistic sources Connolly has provided the reader with a coherent narrative often focused on individuals and their interactions; deals were done transferring fortunes to funds with names like Cerebus and CarVal that have become familiar to us all. Clearly Connolly did enormous research and a great job of putting together a comprehensible chronicle of events along the way. In my view, Nama and those who worked there, with what I think are very few exceptions, come out of all this pretty well; it could have gone very badly. There was the danger that Nama could have been a blanket for indigenous cronyism with its power and resources used to enrich insiders and the connected. This book does not make the case that this is what happened. A grave danger for Ireland at the time of the creation of Nama was that foreign funds would come to see the property market in Ireland as being rigged for insiders and political cronies. Certainly the size of Nama relative to the market was an issue. A functioning and transparent property market was needed to speed recovery, and Nama made a significant contribution to recreating a vibrant market in Irelandwhich in turn helped speed the recovery. This is why Nama was set up, and the recovered market is testimony to it having worked much as intended. Connolly’s coverage of Project Eagle and the dealings around it is very interesting. Some of the players on the fringes of Nama in the North are shown in very poor light and certainly there are questions there. The nexus of real estate, serious money, business and politics in a small and uneasy area such as Northern Ireland is covered extensively. Local politics can be troublesome for big funds and certainly they were something of a minefield for Nama. The story of Nama is not yet over. In some years it will be examined by serious academics from both a political and financial perspective. I think it will come to be seen to have done the job it was set up to do. By any standards it was an enormous and difficult organization to operate. People working in Nama must have been under very great pressure and were certainly not popular, often wrongly seen as property market insiders with comprised intentions. If anything, this book will help readers understand the complexity of what was done. Nama was not inevitable and nor was it the only way toxic loans could be dealt with. It was a political choice. We can never know if another approach would have been better. We do know that the property market recovery was quicker than most expected. Certainly Nama made a contribution to that.   Tom Dunne is head of the School of Surveying and Construction Management at the Dublin Institute of Technology

Yet another controversy over its land disposals has hit Wicklow County Council following a decision by Councillors to hand over a valuable town-centre site in Bray to developer, Paddy McKillen junior. On Monday 15 January, Councillors voted to dispose of the 0.9 hectare Florentine site in Bray to Navybrook Ltd for €2.6m. The site has planning permission for two anchor stores, a cinema complex, retail and business units and a 256-space car-park. A number of Councillors objected to what they considered to be the poor outcome for the Council, claiming that the site was worth more than the agreed sale figure. Council management had accepted the offer from Navybrook, a company controlled by McKillen junior and Matt Ryan, and finalised a development agreement with the property company which sets out the parameters of the project and its completion by August 2019. Last December, Bannon Property Consultants valued the site at €750,000 and said this figure was based on “a single assumption that the subject property is subject to the contractual obligations contained within the Draft Development Agreement”. Under the terms of the agreement the developer “will be required to carry out the development in accordance with the plans, planning consent, developer’s agreement and developer’s timetable as required by Wicklow County Council and only thereafter acquire title to the property upon practical completion of the scheme”. Navybrook only becomes liable to pay the €2.6m price following completion, according to the disposal documents presented to Councillors before their vote in mid-January. At the meeting, some Councillors questioned the Bannon valuation on the basis that the land for sale includes a number of listed houses, at 6-8 Eglinton Road, which are worth more than the figure estimated by the property consultants for the entire site. An adjoining property, at 9 Eglinton Road, was sold in April 2015 for €620,000 while other houses on the street are valued at more than €700,000. The controversy over the disposal deepened when a potential conflict-of-interest issue emerged in the days before the vote. It transpired that there was an error in the valuation document presented by Bannon to the Council last December. In the terms of engagement which are included in the valuation report submitted to the Council, Bannon states that: “We can confirm that we have had no previous involvement with the subject property. We are satisfied that no conflict of interest arises in undertaking this instruction”. This statement under the heading of disclosures and conflicts of interest is repeated in a later section of the, 78-page, Bannon report. Documents seen by Village confirm that Bannon provided a valuation report to a previous owner of the site, Florentine Properties Ltd. (FPL), in 2005 in which it also provided a detailed assessment of projected costs, rental income and profits that could be achieved on completion of a town-centre project on the lands. Wicklow County Council Director of Services, Des O’Brien, told councillors before the vote on 15 January that: “The Council sees this as a simple error. It was a different department of Bannon (retail services rather than property valuations), most of those involved no longer work there, and in any case other than it being so long ago in a completely different market, Florentine Properties Ltd no longer exists to our knowledge. The main shareholders of Florentine Properties, the Ballymore Group, have no interest in the site, nor did they show any interest at any stage in participating in this competition. We believe this was a simple error that has no effect on the process; there is absolutely no conflict of interest, and this in no way affects the basis of their valuation”. Councillor Tom Fortune insisted that questions remained over the contradictions in the Bannon correspondence and said that he had unsuccessfully sought a copy of the Development Agreement made with Navybrook. Council management had refused to circulate the agreement, on legal advice that it contained commercially sensitive information. Councillor Brendan Thornhill was not convinced that the €2.6m agreed with Navybrook was a good deal for the Council given the value of the properties included in the sale package, including five houses, two shops on Main Street and a car park. He claimed that the site was worth closer to €7m than €2.6m. “I say here the people’s best interest is not being served by selling the site at this price, €2.6m”, Councillor Thornhill said. O’Brien disagreed and insisted that the restrictive terms of the development agreement, including a stipulation that the new town centre would be completed by August 2019, represented a good opportunity for the people of Bray. However, he opened up another potential controversy as he sought to explain why it required the valuation from Bannon, after Navybrook had submitted its €2.6m offer. Further uncomfortable questions for the Council arose when O’Brien explained to Councillors how the valuation and tendering process for the Florentine site was carried out. He said that, in 2013, the Council had hired Savills to advise on the potential rental income and value of the site. In 2017, Savills, he said were also commissioned by Navybrook to advise on its intended purchase of the site. Savills, according to O’Brien, continued to work for the Council during this period. After the Council received the €2.6m offer from Navybrook, it sought a fresh tender from Bannon which came in at the €750,000 estimate in the valuation report provided in December 2017. O’Brien said that it could not release the Development Agreement to councillors as it contained confidential valuation information. He did not disclose the original valuation of Florentine provided by Savills to the Council. Neither did he explain, nor was he asked, whether there was a potential conflict of interest arising from the fact that Savills was advising both Navybrook and the Council at the same time. He insisted that as Bannon had no involvement with Navybrook there was no conflict of interest on the part of the property consultants. O’Brien said: “We went and sought a valuation before

‘Gogglebox’ added a new face to its ever-deepening stable of television viewers last October. Pat Wallace, alongside wife Siobhan, joined TV3’s Irish rendering of BBC’s extremely popular vicarious Big Brother-style television inversion. Before then Dr Pat Wallace was notable mostly for his heroic record on the controversial Wood Quay archaeological dig from 1974 when speaking truth to power he took over the excavations at the tender age of 25, an honour he described variably as like “winning a £2 million scholarship” and a “sink or swim situation”. The son of a blacksmith from Askeaton in Limerick, Wallace had earned a scholarship to University College Galway after achieving the highest Leaving Cert results in Limerick for 1966. He later became Director of the National Museum and was a competent and articulate exponent of the archaeological agenda, standing up robustly against other national bodies for the sites in Tara, Woodstown and Carrickmines, in the teeth of aggressive road plans, for example. Hailing from a staunchly Republican background, Wallace was long a supporter of Fianna Fáil and laid the praise for the completion of a new campus in Collins Barracks at the feet of the Taoiseach of the day, Bertie Ahern. On the day of the opening of the Museum at Collins’ Barracks, however, the IMPACT trade union orchestrated a one-day strike which had the effect of keeping the Taoiseach away from the gala, as he refused to cross the picket in his own constituency of Dublin Central. The move to the Barracks had cost upwards of £30m, attracting scorn from some within the organisation who suggested that the premises itself was taking precedence over the artefacts it was ostensibly in service to. Wallace retired in 2012 after 24 years as Head of the National Museum. Wallace’s name came up again in a November 2017 postscript to a blog post originally uploaded in February 2017. Here, he was implicated as presiding over a “toxic” and “hierarchal” culture of “privilege” in his time as Director of the National Museum of Ireland by archaeologist and blogger Adrienne Corless, who described not only being bullied by Wallace but being sexually harassed on several occasions by her immediate superior, who she now felt ready to identify as Andy Halpin. Halpin, she claims, had touched her inappropriately on several occasions while she was working under him at the museum. Repeated informal complaints to HR had had little effect, as following only minor castigations Halpin would continue his harassment of her even having been moved on to other duties, according to the Irish Independent. When Corless finally initiated a formal complaint against Halpin, he confessed that he viewed her as a “foil for his fantasies”. On one occasion after seeing some “tall school girls” and wanting to “prolong the fantasy” he pushed her against a door to “measure [her] height”. Corless describes how she waited impatiently for news of Halpin’s admonishment at the hands of Museum management, only to be told upon phoning the HR department herself simply that they “had implemented the disciplinary code”. HR would not speak further as to what in practice this implied, and so it fell to Corless herself to look up the code and determine that, in fact, “he [had] received the softest possible reprimand”. Corless feels that Wallace knew about Andy Halpin’s behaviour, as it had continued unabated with other women before and after her experience with him, but had “thought that the Civil Service systems in place would take care of the problem of Mr. Halpin”, in spite of her “foolish” hope that Wallace “would say or do more”. In fact, she recalls an instance after she reported Halpin to HR where Wallace allegedly “chuckled to another senior manager” that he never thought “Halpin would have had it in him”, as if he saw her formal complaint against Halpin as a ‘badge of honour’. Some time after the HR complaint, Corless was offered Halpin’s former position, although Halpin was retained by the museum in a different capacity. Now without a department, Corless came to operate directly under Pat Wallace himself, whereupon his abusive and “bullying” behaviour towards her began to take shape. Wallace’s maltreatment of Corless is exemplified in an episode she relates in her blog post of February 12 2017: “At a social occasion, in front of horrified friends from outside the organisation [the National Museum of Ireland], he told my partner in a seemingly jovial way that he’d better not get me pregnant again”. This came following an incident in which Corless phoned to discuss upcoming maternity leave, and was “angrily” lambasted by Wallace who told her it was not his fault she was “up the pole”. This attitude appears to have been serially manifest in Wallace’s dealings with subordinates within the National Museum. Corless describes how “Higher Managers would pale before visitations of [Wallace]”, and how the “entire organisation” remained in a state of constant fear and anxiety over his appearances. In a more recent blog post in January of this year, hosted on the blog site of Grace Dyas who last year initiated the campaign against Michael Colgan’s harassment of women during his tenure as Director of the Gate Theatre, Corless relates the account of a Danish undergraduate student interning at the National Museum. Nina Vodstrup Andersen similarly alleges she experienced sexual harassment at the hands of Andy Halpin, as well as verbal harassment by other, unnamed staff members. Among them was Director Wallace himself, who she claims cornered her in a dim corridor one day and, “in a tone of voice laden with sexual glee”, accused her of having an affair with her supervisor, commenting that “You Scandinavians are all the same” before walking off. Andersen left the museum in 2008. Wallace claimed that his departure from the directorship of the National Museum in 2012 was a result of being effectively forced out by the realities of pension and salary cuts implemented across the board of the public sector in response to the financial crisis.