Buccaneers - Village Magazine

 —  March - April 2012

he High Court will now hear in full

Treasury Holdings’ action against NAMA’s

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 – to sell its

portfolio to third-party investment companies, but

it has failed to repay loans of around € mil-

lion. NAMA also claims Treasury diverted €.

million in shares from a related company to its

directors, just before Treasury’s portfolio went

into NAMA. Nice.

Treasury, Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett,

inspire awe and respect in ﬁnancial, 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 Cortex’s Jack Ronan. Richard comes from

a family of Ballina millers. They were at school

together in Castleknock College.

I ﬁrst met Richard and Johnny in the mid-s

when they were developing the Hilton (subse-

quently Westin) Hotel on Dublin’s College Green.

I was opposing their plan for the biggest destruc-

tion of listed and historic buildings in Dublin since

the s.

After they got their permission, an academic

advised us that they should clearly have con-

ducted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)

because of the signiﬁcant “nature, size and loca-

tion” of the ‘project’. We decided the scheme was

unsustainable and uncivilised, Treasury’s attitude

cocky and the planning authorities’ ﬂouting of the

law on EIA outrageous – 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, didn’t want

the risk of a devastating legal-costs order, we didn’t

want the inevitable PR storm to blow away vulner-

able individuals and we didn’t 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 ‘shelf’

company, the chivalric-sounding, “Lancefort’. After

 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 Pleanála decision which it

was challenging, the protagonists in the company,

primarily I, should have raised the need for an EIA

before An Bord Pleanála. 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 eﬀect. 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 –  – EIA (and its plan-

focused counterpart (SEA) has taken oﬀ as a tool

for residents and environmentalists in assessing

the impact of what is being imposed on them – 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 – and I guess since

Johnny Ronan reckoned we cost them €m, 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 – 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 – including a fawning proﬁle of

David Slattery, the ‘conservation’ architect who

was writing oﬀ the value of some of the buildings

to the beneﬁt of Treasury, in an interview under

the headline “Keeper of the Past”.

When we lost the case, Frank McDonald in the

Irish Times quoted Richard Barrett saying “his [ie

my] house is gone” and that “I” faced legal costs

of £m. 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 ﬁnished up compre-

hensively liquidated. Treasury later boasted that

“certain opponents of ours have underestimated

our ability to cause legal havoc to their detriment”.

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 Ó’Donoghue 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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