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October-November 2025 13
On 13 and 16 June, the Standards in
Public Oce Commission (SIPO)
examined Tommy Reilly, powerful
ex-chair of Meath County Council
(MCC) and unreconstructed Fianna
Fáil Councillor.
At the centre of the controversy was a
35-acre site, purchased for €500,000 in 2016
and placed on the market for €4.2 million a
year later, after the lands were rezoned from
agricultural to light industrial use. Planning
permission for development was granted in
June 2018 by a Council in which Reilly played a
key role. In 2017, the National Transport
Authority questioned the rationale of
developing enterprise activities at a location
so far from Navan town centre with few or no
public transport services to the site.
Two of then-Cathaoirleach Reilly’s sons,
Ciarán and Tomás, are directors of the company
that owns the land.
The complaint that brought the case to the
attention of SIPO was submitted in March
2022 by me, documenting alleged breaches of
the Local Government Act and the Lobbying
Act, among other laws, primarily on the back
of a Village article by Frank Connolly.
The article revealed how Tommy Reilly
attended a number of meetings where the
rezoning of the lands at Liscarton was
discussed by members and ocials of MCC
from 2016, was present at a pre-planning
meeting with his son Ciarán and participated
at a meeting when zoning was approved in July
2017. He withdrew from the meeting but did
not disclose the reason for his potential conflict
of interest.
The complaint to SIPO alleged, inter alia,
that “S 4.5 of the Code of Conduct under the
2001 Act notes that The 2001 Local
Government Act also provides that where a
councillor has actual knowledge that a matter
is going to arise at a meeting at which s/he will
not be present, but if s/he were, a disclosure
would be necessary, then in advance of the
meeting s/he must make such disclosure in
writing to the Ethics Registrar”.
This provision was breached by Councillor
Reilly, as he had confirmed to Village that he
knew about Ciarán Reilly’s interest when he
met him in his son’s shop and canteen in
advance of the rezoning in July 2017.
When it finally proceeded in June 2025, after
two postponements, media and others were
given just four days’ notice, effectively
suppressing public awareness. On the first day
of the hearing, SIPO dropped some of the most
serious allegations, including about breaches
of the Lobbying Acts, after a closed legal
discussion. They were collapsed, without
consulting me, on the back of the fact SIPO
seems to have translated most of my complaint
which centred on breaches of legislation into
a complaint about breaches of a version of the
Code of Conduct for Councillors which turned
out to have been adopted after the alleged
improper conduct.
Di
DiSIPO
inting
inting
Nobody cares about SIPO, least of all RTÉ and the Irish Times,
as evidenced by coverage of its hearings, especially the recent
one finding FF’s Meath Cathaoirleach, Tommy Reilly, attended
meetings that yielded his son a €3.7m book profit.
By Michael Smith
Reilly, who served on Meath County Council
from 1996 until he gratifyingly lost his seat in
2024, portrayed himself as a victim. He told
the Commission that he had been “tortured”
for six years, lost his livelihood, and was
attacked on social media by what he called a
“certain group of political people”. This
reminds me of the hysteria of Seán FitzPatrick,
at the height of his master-of-the-universe
incarnation when he summoned “Corporate
McCarthyism” in the context of a complaint
that I had lodged about conflicts of interest he
had as a director of the Dublin Docklands
Authority. He was chairman of a bank [Anglo
Irish Bank] that decided the height and
social-housing content of developments by
customers of that bank.
For the first time in 63 years, Reilly claimed,
he was asked not to canvass during an
election. Reilly had previously stepped down
as a candidate for Fianna Fáil in a 2005 Dáil
by-election following a controversy involving
a land purchase with Frank Dunlop in 1997
(exposed by Frank Connolly in the Sunday
NEWS
14 October-November 2025
Business Post). At that time, he said he had
been the subject of a witch-hunt.
Reilly claimed an ocial told him he did not
have to leave the Council meeting on 19 July
2017 because he had no financial or other
interest in that land at Liscarton. That
unnamed ocial was not held to account for
that advice.
But Reilly admitted he did not specify the
nature of the conflict and failed to update his
declaration of interests. “I find it all very
confusing”, he said, adding: “My son was
involved. I knew that much. Was that not
enough?”.
No. Tommy Reilly attended at least three
Council meetings about the rezoning between
2016 and 2017, failing to declare his sons’
interest as required.
He was present at a special meeting of the
Council on 29 May 2017 and was among the
28 councillors who accepted the Chief
Executive’s recommendation to rezone the
land, without a vote. He did not disclose any
interest in the land though a Council ocial
reminded councillors of their obligations
“under Section 177 of the Local Government
Act, 2001 and associated regulations in
regard to beneficial interest”.
In March 2018, Reilly attended a pre-
planning meeting with his son and engineers
from Collins Boyd. Documents submitted with
the subsequent planning application listed
Tommy Reilly as an applicant, something he
said he was “not too happy” to discover,
claiming he had “attacked” his son over the
error. No-one has got to the bottom of the
error, which seems a big one.
Jackie Maguire, Chief Executive of Meath
County Council at the time, also testified. She
had maintained that it was merely “unwise”
of Reilly to attend the pre-planning meeting.
“Inadvertent”.
At the SIPO hearing, Jackie Maguire
proposed that the system was to blame:
“greater training” should be given to
councillors, she said, because the ethics
system can be “confusing”. She failed to take
responsibility for ocials’ ineptitude even
though the Council management employs an
ethics officer. Nobody in the discourse
registered that Maguire did not take seriously
the process or the first complaint that I sent
her about Tommy Reilly.
In other testimony, Ciarán Reilly said he got
involved in the land deal as an investment. He
denied that his name was kept o early
company filings to obscure the family link.
Tomás Reilly, who became a director at his
brother’s request, admitted he had no
knowledge of the company’s finances,
reluctantly declaring he worked for Met
Éireann, and could not explain why company
records showed the company owed him over
€15,000.
SIPO said it “was not persuaded by the
evidence provided by Mr Ciarán Reilly, Mr
Tomás Reilly and Mr Tommy Reilly and found
itself unable to rely on it”. It noted: “it is
regrettable that there was no appropriate
guidance provided by Meath County Council
ocials…The failure on the part of the Council
to comply with that statutory provision is not
satisfactory. The absence of a record of the
meeting made the task of the Commission
more dicult”.
It found that “Mr Tommy Reilly attended the
Pre-Planning Consultation for the purpose of
representing his son’s company in a matter
which would ultimately come before the
council executive for decision and which would
potentially significantly benefit his son [in]
contravention of section 168 of the Local
Government Act… these were matters of
significant public importance… Mr Tommy
Reilly acted recklessly… not in good faith…
Finally, the Commission finds that these were
serious, as opposed to minor, matters”.
Despite the seriousness of the allegations
and the potential financial gain arising from
the rezoning, coverage of the aair was scant.
In its report, the Irish Independent wrongly
claimed that Maguire, not me, had initiated the
complaint and then didn’t bother reporting the
actual decision from SIPO. That is, it
misreported the hearing and then didn’t report
the result. The Irish Times and Irish Examiner
did not report on the hearing at all but did on
the result, though without commentary by their
political team who were presumably finishing
their retrospectives on the Cowen era for their
Outside Politics podcast. On the day of the
hearing, RTÉ reported only before the hearings
began when there was no content on the
specifics of the complaint. At a national level,
only The Journal reported on what occurred
during the second day of the hearing.
In September, Meath County Council
management refused a request by elected
members to discuss the SIPO findings about
Reilly and several ocials, on the spurious
grounds that there may be an appeal of the
ruling. Their decision on this drove another
coach and horses through elementary conflicts
of interests standards.
SIPO, which obtains about 150 complaints
a year against people in local and national
government, seems to uphold a complaint on
average about once every one or two years.
The national media yawningly don’t then
report the findings properly. SIPO has made it
clear what needs to change to make it eective
and what extra powers it needs, primarily the
right to instigate its own investigations, but
nobody cares enough to even notice.
My own experience has been sad. My first
SIPO salvo was against Seán FitzPatrick, in
2007. Then there was a finding, in 2011, that
Lord Mayor Oisín Quinn had breached the code
by promoting changes to Dublin City building
heights that might benefit a landholding he
himself owned. The complaint did not deny
that this was not at the upper end of
improprieties but The Irish Times focused only
on that: on the fact SIPO found the breach
“minor”, not that it had made a rare finding of
“a breach”.
A few years ago my complaint against
Wexford County Councillors for applauding the
County CEO because he’d been found by SIPO
to have, improperly, sent emails to a radio
station threatening to withdraw Council
advertising during a dispute concerning the
station’s coverage of the Council, was
dismissed by SIPO as not adequately “serious”.
Earlier this year it dismissed a complaint by
Paul Murphy about #LeotheLeak: first, before
a successful judicial review, on grounds SIPO
did not have jurisdiction over a former
Taoiseach, and then on the ground that there
was insucient evidence that the document
that Varadkar had leaked, though marked
“confidential”, was confidential. My 2025
complaint against Michael Healy-Rae for not
resigning from companies of which he is a
remunerated director when becoming a
Minister is going through the process. Six
months on, the Minister has not resigned his
directorship. It will be interesting to see if,
when he does, SIPO gives him a retrospective
pass.
The misery of getting intricately involved in
the SIPO process, enduring the idiocy of
ethically inert councils before you even get to
SIPO, which is toothless, is compounded by
the fact that nobody in the media reports
accurately what is going on, less still what is at
stake.
In September, Meath County Council
management refused a request by elected
members to discuss the SIPO findings
about Reilly and several officials, on the
spurious grounds that there may be an
appeal of the ruling. Their decision on this
drove another coach and horses through
elementary conflicts of interests standards
