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From a media perspective, Dr James Reilly is certainly the bonus that keeps on giving. The latest controversy over his preference for hospital extensions in Wexford and Kilkenny following representations from his two cabinet colleagues, Brendan Howlin and Phil Hogan, has landed him back in the deep but other matters from his dimmish past continue to haunt him. His business association, for example, with serial re-zoner, Anne Devitt  – his party colleague in north Dublin who was forced to resign from Fine Gael in the wake of the Mahon tribunal report last year – has the potential to further destabilise the health minister’s political future. The tribunal found that she was compromised when, between 1994 and 1997, she promoted a planning application by the Cargobridge consortium on lands near the airport, assistance for which the company agreed to pay despite her position as a prominent county councillor. Others caught up in the Cargobridge controversy included current chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, John McGuinness (FF), who helped his brother Michael, a principal of the company, to secure a right of way by making representations on the matter to former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds in 1992. Reilly, of course, was partnered by Devitt in his ill-fated Carrick-on-Suir nursing home investment which resulted in his entry in Stubbs Gazette last year, but a more recent controversy also has the minister on the back foot. As has been widely reported, he served on the remuneration committee of the Irish Medical Organisation when it cleared the phenomenal €20 million (now reduced to €9.7 million) pension for its general secretary, George McNeice, back in 2004. He also served with McNeice on the board of the www.mygp.ie website which was funded by the HSE to the tune of £2.3 million before it was taken down in 2007. The company, which provided consumer health information, collapsed amid an acrimonious legal dispute with the HSE which was resolved through arbitration and a ‘confidential settlement’. Reilly stepped down as a director of the company in August 2006 but has remained as joint, non-beneficial, shareholder.  The website was funded through the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics at St James Hospital, Dublin through a scheme that involved the reinvestment of savings made by GPs in their drug costs.

The latest flight of the earls was led in recent years by Cork developer John Fleming who took refuge in bankruptcy in England in order to avoid the clutches of the Irish revenue and assorted creditors after he was left with debts of more than €1 billion. Fleming was responsible for a string of residential, commercial and hotel developments in a property empire that stretched across Ireland, Britain, Cyprus and the US but ended in a modest terraced house in Billericay in Essex. As well as losing his extensive property assets which included the five-star Fota Island hotel and golf course, and the Inchydoney Spa and hotel developments, in Cork, Fleming left a massive eyesore in Sandyford, south Dublin where the unfinished 14-storey Sentinel building dominates the landscape in the middle of the unfinished development. But there is more to this failed business venture than meets the eye as one of the reasons why his ambitious plans for the area failed was a delay incurred by the developer following an objection to An Bord Pleanála to the planning permission granted to John J Fleming Construction in January 2007 by Dun Laoghaire –Rathdown County Council for a mixed scheme at Blackthorn Drive in the Sandyford Industrial Estate. Strangely, the first objection to the Council, lodged in February 2007, came from an organisation called Stillorgan Planning Focus with an address at 22a Brookfield Avenue, Blackrock, which is located a fair distance from Sandyford, in more residential climes. Signed by one E James Taylor, who lives in Mount Merrion, the objection letter claimed that the plan represented an over-development of the former Allegro site, that the height was disproportionate and that it was “unattractive, unimaginative and uninspiring”. After planning was granted, an appeal to An Bord Pleanála was lodged by the ‘Planning Focus’ but withdrawn within weeks, in May 2007. The planning permission was upheld but by this time Fleming, along with many other developers, was feeling the cold wind of a property slow down and ultimately declared himself bankrupt in England three years later. What remains unclear is the motivation behind the objection and what if any contact Fleming had with the parties involved in the so-called Stillorgan Planning Focus. When local Green Party activist and former councillor, Tom Kivlehan, visited the address for ‘Focus’ in Blackrock he discovered that no such entity was known at the address. Contacted by Village, Eamon James Taylor said that he could not recall the 2007 planning objection and appeal to the Sandyford scheme. he said that the Stillorgan Planning Focus was made up of people who drank in a pub in Blackrock. He could not recall the names of any of his c0-objectors or the name of the pub. He said that he not been in good health in recent years and was unable to explain why the objection was made and the appeal suddenly withdrawn. He said that he had never met the developer, John Fleming, and did not recall the development to which he and his drinking friends had objected, or why. “Planning records indicate that this was the only objection ever submitted by the Stillorgan Planning Focus despite the scale of development in the south city and county during those years,” said Kivlehan. Attempts to contact John Fleming at the London-based consultancy, Crowley-Young, with which he is associated were unsuccessful.

Online Anonymity is irrelevant: the only currency is truth – Sheila Armstrong