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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
īī ā īīīīīīī March - April 2012
T
he High Court will now hear in full
Treasury Holdingsā action against NAMAās
bid to put many of its Irish properties into
receivership with Ernst Young.
Treasury, one of the ten biggest borrowers with
the State loans agency, feels it is on the verge of a
deal favourable to both it and NAMA ā to sell its
portfolio to third-party investment companies, but
it has failed to repay loans of around ā¬īīī mil-
lion. NAMA also claims Treasury diverted ā¬īī.ī
million in shares from a related company to its
directors, just before Treasuryās portfolio went
into NAMA. Nice.
Treasury, Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett,
inspire awe and respect in ļ¬nancial, political and
media circles but I have had reason to be circum-
spect, myself, over the years.
Johnny is an accountant whose father was a
wealthy pig farmer in Tipperary and whose cousin
is Vita Cortexās Jack Ronan. Richard comes from
a family of Ballina millers. They were at school
together in Castleknock College.
I ļ¬rst met Richard and Johnny in the mid-īīīīs
when they were developing the Hilton (subse-
quently Westin) Hotel on Dublinās College Green.
I was opposing their plan for the biggest destruc-
tion of listed and historic buildings in Dublin since
the īīīīs.
After they got their permission, an academic
advised us that they should clearly have con-
ducted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
because of the signiļ¬cant ānature, size and loca-
tionā of the āprojectā. We decided the scheme was
unsustainable and uncivilised, Treasuryās attitude
cocky and the planning authoritiesā ļ¬outing of the
law on EIA outrageous ā so we would attack their
scheme in the courts.
Treasury allegedly played dirty and were
involved in twenty-six other sets of litigation. An
Taisce, which I had been representing, didnāt want
the risk of a devastating legal-costs order, we didnāt
want the inevitable PR storm to blow away vulner-
able individuals and we didnāt want personal legal
liability for costs, so we formed a company that
could take the litigation.
We had little time so we got a pre-formed āshelfā
company, the chivalric-sounding, āLancefortā. After
īī appearances in the High-Court and six days in
the Supreme Court Lancefort lost its case on the
primary ground that, although it was okay to liti-
gate through a company that had not even existed
at the time of the Bord PleanƔla decision which it
was challenging, the protagonists in the company,
primarily I, should have raised the need for an EIA
before An Bord PleanƔla. The chief justice Ronan
Keane seemed to imply I had known of the point
at the time, even though I did not and there was no
evidence to that eļ¬ect. Usually the Supreme Court
does not invent facts. Furthermore European law
clearly states it is the obligation of the authorities
to conduct the EIA.
Academics and practitioners generally accept
that the Lancefort decision is wrongly-decided.
Since that time ā īīīī ā EIA (and its plan-
focused counterpart (SEA) has taken oļ¬ as a tool
for residents and environmentalists in assessing
the impact of what is being imposed on them ā if
only because it often requires photomontages of
the proposed scheme and an indication that the
developer fully considered the alternatives.
During the campaign we were assailed by
Treasury and their PR team ā and I guess since
Johnny Ronan reckoned we cost them ā¬īm, we
were fair game.
Irish Times environment correspondent, Frank
McDonald, is often one of the most acute and cou-
rageous commentators on these matters. But he is
close to Richard Barrett ā as well as to some of us
in the campaigning sector, and he wrote several
damaging reports including pieces misrepresent-
ing our European Law stance in a way unwittingly
likely to annoy Irish judges, mis-stating the num-
bers of listed/historic buildings on the site and
giving extraordinary coverage to the support-
ers of the scheme ā including a fawning proļ¬le of
David Slattery, the āconservationā architect who
was writing oļ¬ the value of some of the buildings
to the beneļ¬t of Treasury, in an interview under
the headline āKeeper of the Pastā.
When we lost the case, Frank McDonald in the
Irish Times quoted Richard Barrett saying āhis [ie
my] house is goneā and that āIā faced legal costs
of Ā£īm. In fact, we were always going to escape
the costs of the case because the company was a
separate vehicle from its directors, who at vari-
ous stages included heritage activists Garret Kelly,
Ian Lumley, Tony Lowes and in the end my gamey
brother.
Nonetheless Lancefort ļ¬nished up compre-
hensively liquidated. Treasury later boasted that
ācertain opponents of ours have underestimated
our ability to cause legal havoc to their detrimentā.
This was probably true.
At one stage, when the publicity was bad and
the case looked fragile, we had discussions with
Johnny Ronan about settling our case and it appears
some of our lawyers got further with instructions
we gave them than we had understood. We were
then skewered by Matt Cooper in the Sunday
Tribune and Cliodhna ĆāDonoghue of the prop-
erty section of the Irish Independent in aggressive
but not entirely unfair features that made it sound
like we were seeking money for ourselves rather
Buccaneers
michael smith
The Treasury boys once had little Dublin at their feet
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The boys and political friend
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than building-conservation causes (which we were
not). We had discussed a wide range of possible
resolutions āwithout prejudiceā and got nowhere
close to agreeing any of them.
It emerged a little later that Cliodhna
ĆāDonoghue was the beneļ¬ciary of a major Italian
trip paid for by Treasury in īīīī, encompassing
the inevitable Celtic Pavarotti extravaganza.
I
n īīīī I was invited by current aļ¬airs maga-
zine, Magill, to write about all this for a new
ārantā column it was instigating. Not too sure
of what they expected, I wrote a wry piece,
like this one, and advised them to check it for libel
and tone before hearing nothing more for months
(magazine-article commissioners can be insensi-
tive). The next I heard was from the Irish Times
asking me if I knew about the scrapping of an
entire print run of Magill. It appears that Emily
OāReilly, the then incoming editor and a friend
of Frank McDonald, didnāt like the article which
had been commissioned under her predecessor,
Vincent Browne. But hadnāt bothered to inform
me. The Sunday Tribune implied the article was
libellous but that seems unlikely.
I also remember the boys (you have to call
them the boys) at around that time when Paul
Clinton was trying to develop the vast Carlton
Site between Dublinās Oā Connell St and Moore
St. Irritatingly for Clinton, Treasury proposed a
detailed scheme designed by AndrƩ Wejchert for
Clintonās site, even though Treasury didnāt own
it, a scheme which almost inexplicably made its
way into Dublin Corporationās plan for the area.
Treasury advised him that if he did not let the boys
develop his site as a joint venture with him they
would ensure he was denied planning permis-
sion, they (hilariously in view of the analogy to
the Lancefort Case) would sue to demand an EIA
and ātake the case to Europeā and that if after all
that he got permission they would ensure he was
compulsorily purchased by Dublin Corporation.
Barrett, the alleged sophisticate, told Clinton
that Treasury was ātorturingā and had its āfeet
on the throatā of adjoining developer Garret
Kelleher (who subsequently attempted to build
North Americaās tallest residential building in
Chicago). They used a small site they owned for
its āstrategic nuisance valueā against mild-man-
nered Kelleher, pressurised their mutual bank,
Anglo Irish, to make life diļ¬cult for him and
inveighed that like cowboys they were going to
(yawn) ārun him out of townā.
When Frank Connolly printed this in the
Sunday Business Post, Barrett threatened to sue
the newspaper for ā¬īī million in damages and to
āsue the pants oļ¬ā Paul Clinton for ā¬īīīm Euro ā
though of course after the threat made its way into
the adoring media, no more was heard of it.
Cutting the story short... twelve years later just
as Dublin City Council was on the brink of com-
pulsorily purchasing his land, Clinton sold out on
favourable terms to Joe OāReilly, the developer
of the Dundrum Shopping Centre. (Complexly,
Paul Clinton is now a partner of mine in a food
venture.)
Subsequently, Treasury fronted the vast and
over-scaled Spencer Dock scheme. It failed after
Bertie sort of came out against it to assuage his
constituents, though both he and his successor,
Cowen, went all knock-kneed in the presence of
the boys, particularly of Barrett.
Clinton and I were by now well out of love
with Treasury, who were everywhere. Clinton
drew attention to the extraordinary deal they had
with malleable CIĆ, which owned the site of the
National Convention Centre (NCC), a deal which
left state-owned CIĆ with nearly all the potential
downside risk and none of the land-carry costs of
the Spencer Dock scheme and NCC. Fifteen years
later it emerged the deal on the NCC was massively
skewed against the state. For example, the state
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