by Shane Ross
Fingleton cultivated an image as a personality banker. He was a willing sponsor of media events and, as his society went from strength to strength, he was paid back with plenty of free media coverage. At the same time he continued to keep close to politicians and the press. For over a decade the Irish Nationwide sponsored the annual golf outing between teams from the Oireachtas, the press, the army and the Gardaí. It was often held in Woodbrook Golf Club where he was a member. He took a delight in being photographed with the winning team.
The Fine Gael party saw him as a Fianna Fáil sympathizer. A story is told that his access to Leinster House was stopped after a spat one evening with Fine Gael TD Sean Barrett and a party colleague. Fingleton is supposed to have been striding down the main corridor towards the restaurant when he spotted the two Blueshirts just in front of him. Apparently he made a cutting remark – a reference to their loss of the 1987 general election – with the result that Leinster House became a Fingleton-free zone for three months.
He enjoyed the high life and the company of high livers. He golfed at the K Club. He was a regular guest at Michael Smurfit’s annual bash, joining a collection of the great and the good who paid homage at the packaging millionaire’s court. Politicians Michael Lowry, Albert Reynolds and the late Jim Mitchell were regulars. Others to attend included businessman Denis O’Brien, beef baron Larry Goodman and builder Sean Mulryan. It was a lavish affair often held in one of Dublin’s five-star hotels.
Fingers was part of the Smurfit inner circle that made the cut for the great man’s seventieth birthday party cruise in the Mediterranean in 2006. It was the party to beat all parties. One hundred and twenty of Smurfit’s closest friends were there, including Gary McGann of Smurfits and Anglo, former Smurfit boss and Bank of Ireland governor Howard Kilroy, and Michael Smurfit’s one-time right-hand man, the late Paddy Wright. Dermot Desmond, auctioneers Padraig Hassett and Arthur French, solicitor James O’Dwyer and entrepreneur Gerry Purcell and his wife Aisling also relaxed on the luxury yacht.
Fingers’s socializing in such elevated circles meant that he met plenty of property developers. The Irish Nationwide had a corporate box at Croke Park, and Fingleton used it to host big clients including developers Sean Mulryan and Sean Dunne and supermarket king Ben Dunne.
Such corporate massaging badly backfired in one case, as Ben Dunne told me. The former supermarket mogul used to receive tickets from his friend for all the big GAA matches. He had come to look forward to them. He was doubly pleased when the GAA finally lifted the ban on foreign games and the date of the highly charged Ireland versus England rugby match approached in the spring of 2007. It was billed as a historic event, with all the memories of the original Bloody Sunday at the GAA ground due to be exorcized. Dunne waited for his tickets. A few days before the game, they had still not arrived. Fearing some mistake, he rang Fingers.
Fingers played for time. He asked Dunne to ‘leave it with him’. He rang Dunne back the next day.
‘Ben,’ he said, ‘those tickets are as scarce as hen’s teeth but I have tickets for you for Hill 16.’
Ben bristled: ‘You know what you can do with your Hill 16 tickets.’
Dunne is convinced that the goateed building society boss was holding on to the better seats for his Dublin 4 pals. A few weeks later, when his fixed-term deposit came up for renewal, Dunne removed several millions from the Irish Nationwide. Still angry two years later, Dunne told me, ‘I am not good enough for those Dublin 4 snobs. Since that day the only man with a beard I ever trusted was Santa Claus.’
While Fingleton’s style ensured that he received far more media attention than any of his rivals, his operation had substance and he ran a tight ship. After the Irish Permanent (in 1994) and First National (in 1998) had embarked on public flotations, their members received windfall gains. Hungry investors immediately sought the next building society on the block. The Nationwide became the clear favourite, and members of the building society began to anticipate the wind-fall that would come with a sale. Deposits poured in as hopes rose of a distribution approaching €15,000 for each qualifying member. Building societies were not obliged to disclose the number of depositors on the books, but Fingers was rumoured to have built up some 125,000 savers, giving him a strong capital base. To deter carpetbaggers he introduced a minimum level of savings – at least €20,000 for over two years – for those who would ultimately benefit if the society was ever sold. Members with home loans would also qualify.
Expectations among members were unrealistically high. Along with those expectations came impatience. Year after year Fingleton was frustrated in his efforts to sell the society outright: a change in the law was needed in order for him to take his preferred route of selling the society in a single transaction to a bank. As the law stood, no such sale could take place until five years after the society dispensed with its mutual status.
At successive AGMs he pleaded with angry members that legislation was just round the corner. The meetings attracted increasing numbers of rebels seeking to depose the boss. Despite Fingleton’s political clout the legislation was delayed for several years as the government wavered between the competing demands of the Irish Nationwide and its rival society, the EBS. Eventually, in the spring of 2006, the two building societies agreed a compromise which would allow both to take whichever course they wanted. The Building Societies Bill was passed in a late-night Dáil debate just before the summer recess. Fingleton was at last free to sell the society.
Fingers, now sixty-eight years of age, was in a hurry. He quickly headed for the market in search of a suitor. But the clouds were beginning to gather over the global banking system. By the time he was ready to talk turkey, it was autumn 2007; Northern Rock had gone bust and the credit crunch had begun. In October he appointed Goldman Sachs as advisers on the sale, but by then banks were faltering worldwide. None of the big Irish banks showed much interest. Members had hoped for a bidding war between a blue-chip foreigner and Irish Life & Permanent, but none materialized. The quality of possible bidders was second-division. Interest had been expressed by Landsbanki of Iceland, and also by Irish financier Derek Quinlan’s vehicle, Quinlan Private, in a joint bid with the Bank of Scotland. The optimistic number of €1.5 billion was put on the value of the society, but the valuation diminished by the month and the suitors began to vanish. First Quinlan Private, furious that its name had appeared in the press, and next Landsbanki, under intense pressure on the home front in Iceland, pulled out. A few months later Landsbanki was rescued by the Icelandic government.
Fingleton was a year too late. There was no one left in the field.
On one flank there was an irate membership seeing its windfall evaporating by the day. On the other Fingers suddenly faced a group of property developers with debts to the Irish Nationwide that looked increasingly menacing. For years the same developers had been the source of a spike in his profit figures. They had made Fingers into a magician. Now he was facing a horrific figure for bad debts.
Fingleton was more personally vulnerable than other bankers. Two fundamental questions were suddenly being asked. How was a building society ever allowed to become a developers’ bank? And how did Fingleton himself manage to be paid millions while his society was facing possible doomsday?
For years Irish Nationwide members were happy for the maestro to walk away with a huge pay packet as long as he performed miracles for them and as long as the prospect of €15,000 or €20,000 landing in their pockets remained alive. Fingers was given the credit for building up this comfort zone for their rainy day. But once the prospect of a big payday for the members drifted, they began to question whether he was the magician they had once believed. Admiration turned into disillusion.
When the property market was booming, members and managers alike were gung-ho; but when the manure hit the fan, everyone started to play the blame game. In a matter of months Fingleton turned from hero to villain.
5. A Deadly Triumvirate
Ireland’s b
ankers could not have destroyed the economy on their own. They did it in league with the property developers, who borrowed recklessly on the apparent assumption that the good times would never stop rolling, and with the Fianna Fáil-led government, which provided a tasty menu of tax breaks for its developer friends.
In early 2007 all three elements of the triumvirate – banks, developers and Fianna Fáil – seemed to be unstoppable. The government, awash with revenue from property taxes, was on the verge of winning a hat-trick of general elections; hugely enriched bankers had announced record profits; and the builders were billionaires.
The Tent
It was Tuesday 15 May 2007. The general election campaign was in full swing, and Bertie Ahern’s old friend Tony Blair had set up a ‘spectacular’ to help him out. The Taoiseach was to be honoured for his role in the peace process, and would deliver a historic oration. Back in Ireland the live television coverage was designed to portray him as a great statesman – in the dying days of his faltering election campaign.
Tickets were like gold dust. Irish TDs and senators had been turned away. Staff at the Irish Embassy in London were relegated to the waiting list. Even one of the architects of the peace process, Albert Reynolds, was excluded. Albert was no friend of Bertie’s.
Assembling in the Royal Gallery of the Palace of Westminster were Blair, his predecessor John Major and Chancellor Gordon Brown, who would succeed him as prime minister the following month. Former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, General John de Chastelain, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Lord Peter Brooke and the incumbent Peter Hain took their seats.
Suddenly, down the Royal Gallery strode a couple in full plumage. They were unrecognized by the British VIPs, but familiar to the very few Irish politicians who had made the cut. One told me that he gasped with shock at the sight of them. He asked himself, ‘What in the name of God are they doing here?’
Ireland’s most controversial property developer, Sean Dunne, and his beautiful young wife, journalist Gayle Killilea, strutted into the Royal Gallery as though they had single-handedly brought peace to the warring communities in Northern Ireland. The glamorous duo were there by special invitation of Bertie Ahern. Apparently the builder from Carlow had asked for two tickets and the Taoiseach had delivered. Tongues in Ireland instantly began to wag. Many asked how a rough diamond like Dunne, a property developer to boot, had such clout that he could command a seat at the table of the mighty.
It was a fair question.
And it was not the last time that Dunne surfaced surprisingly in Bertie’s party at international events of historic importance. A year later, in April 2008, he pulled off the double when he was included in the Irish delegation visiting the US Congress for Bertie’s farewell address.
Dunne was a uniquely conspicuous example of his breed. In July 2005 he had shocked his fellow developers – who are not easily shocked – when he paid €260 million for the five-acre Jurys site in Ballsbridge, a transaction that set a spectacular new Irish record of €53.7 million an acre. A few months later Dunne bought the adjacent Berkeley Court Hotel site for another €119 million, this time clocking up a new record of €57.5 million an acre. He was soon to reveal ambitious plans to develop the site into ‘Dublin’s Knightsbridge’, with 500 apartments and a 37-storey tower. In April 2006 Dunne paid €200 million for a piece of the AIB Bank-centre site, just down the road from the hotel sites. And in August 2006 Dunne’s love affair with Ballsbridge climaxed: he bought Hume House, on a 65-acre site, in a swap deal with Irish Life. In their book The Builders, Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan calculate that Dunne paid the equivalent of €195 million an acre for the site.
Dunne is a Fianna Fáil groupie who cultivates the party top brass assiduously. He invited both Ahern and Finance Minister Charlie McCreevy to his wedding to Killilea in 2004, but the two had more pressing engagements. By all accounts they missed a good bash on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, Christina O, in the Mediterranean, a celebration reputed to have cost the developer €1.5 million.
Dunne’s personal assistant Anto Kelly is a prominent member of Ógra Fianna Fáil and was a one-time election agent for the former Fianna Fáil minister and current Dáil Ceann Comhairle, John O’Donoghue.
Dunne may have relished the elevated atmosphere at Westminster and Washington, but he could also mix it with the other side of life. As a Fianna Fáil groupie he was a frequent visitor to another, but more humble, Bertie gig: the infamous Fianna Fáil fund-raising tent at the Galway Races.
He has happy memories of the Galway tent. One day, as the racing ended, Bertie Ahern was holding court at his table. His usual gang of Des Richardson, Attorney General Rory Brady, the late senator Tony Kett and Dunne himself were shooting the breeze. A young reporter from the Sunday Independent approached the Taoiseach’s table to interview Richardson for the paper. Before she could reach her quarry, Dunne was on his feet. He hijacked the young Gayle Killilea and began the wooing process that ended in the high-society marriage. Killilea never did the interview with Richardson.
Dunne was only one of many developers to frequent the Fianna Fáil tent in Galway. The tent was established in 1994, when Albert Reynolds was in his last months as leader, and it grew to flourish under Bertie. Other key personalities there included the most colourful of all Ireland’s builders, Mick Bailey.
The Bailey brothers, Mick and Tom, were the original villains of the Flood Tribunal. After giving evidence to the tribunal in 2000 about corrupt payments to politicians and council officials in North Dublin, they were savaged in Justice Fergus Flood’s 2002 interim report. He threw the book at them, condemning the brothers for lying, making false allegations, obstruction and leaking to the media. Unperturbed by the tribunal’s dressing down, the Bailey brothers surpassed themselves when, four years later, they made an all-time record settlement with the Revenue for €22.17 million.
The Baileys were quintessential Fianna Fáil. The quieter of the brothers, Tom, had taken time off work in 2002 to canvass for the party in Roscommon. Both men remained loyalists to the last. In turn they were never cold-shouldered by the party hierarchy, despite their transgressions. They remained welcome guests in the Galway tent.
The news of Mick’s record tax settlement broke in June 2006 – the same day as Charles Haughey’s state funeral. Mick, a pal of the former Taoiseach, was greeted at the funeral mass by the party faithful as an honoured guest.
Mick Bailey, a fanatical racegoer and also joint Master of the Ward Hunt in his native Co. Meath, was invariably the life and soul of the Galway tent. He would regularly take a table for three days at the Galway Races – two days for himself and one for his wife on Ladies Day.
At the end of the meeting he would often render ‘The West’s Awake’ to a well-lubricated audience. It was Mick who, in a moment of exuberance at Cheltenham Races, was reported to have given the Queen Mother a big hug, planted a kiss on her cheek, told her she was ‘a great woman’ and invited her to Ireland.
Less colourful builders and businessmen who made frequent trips to the Galway tent included Bernard McNamara of Michael McNamara & Co, Paddy McKillen of Clarendon Properties, Sean Mulryan of Ballymore Properties, Johnny Ronan of Treasury Holdings, Seamus Ross of Menolly Homes and Padraig Rhatigan, a top Galway builder.
The tent became an annual flashpoint of controversy. When asked, Bertie Ahern insisted that Fianna Fáil only raised €150,000 each year at the races; but it was widely seen as an occasion where developers could rub shoulders with cabinet ministers in a well-oiled atmosphere. It gave the builders access to power and it provided funds for the Fianna Fáil party. A table of ten on the most popular days, Wednesday and Thursday, cost €4,000 in 2007, its final year. For that, supporters could chew the ear off Bertie and his cabinet colleagues. After they had enjoyed the Galway tent hospitality, some of the guests appeared on the list of those giving generously to Fianna Fáil candidates standing for election.
Paschal Taggart, property investor and former chair
man of Bord na gCon, the semi-state greyhound racing organization, was a regular guest at the tent. He enjoyed it and did not see anything sinister in it. ‘I never saw any business done in the tent,’ he says. ‘It was real end-of-term stuff for everyone. It was the end of July, the Dáil was in recess, the school exams were over and it was the beginning of the builders’ holidays. It was fun, fun, fun with a few glasses of wine drunk, meaning that everyone was in the best of form.’
Bang in the centre of it all was Bertie. The Taoiseach would move from table to table, greeting his wealthy guests with his standard, ‘How are all the hard-working men?’ Then he would pose for the mandatory photograph with a builder’s wife or two and move on. ‘We can’t run the party without it,’ he insisted in 2005, when the propriety of the tent was questioned once again. He said it was not a rich builders’ bash, contrary to media claims: ‘The people in my constituency who come are ordinary Joe Soaps who put their hands in their pocket and have a great week in Galway.’
His successor Brian Cowen, although a frequenter of the tent, took a less benign view. Cowen believed that the image of builders and politicians scratching each other’s backs, at a time when the excesses of property developers had brought about a national crisis, was doing damage to the party. In the words of Fianna Fáil Senate leader Donie Cassidy, the Galway tent ‘was making us a holy show’. Cowen killed off his predecessor’s baby within three weeks of gaining power.
So the tent folded – just in time for the builders, who had run out of cash by the time Brian Cowen judged it a liability.
The Tribe
The connections between Fianna Fáil and the property developers stretched far beyond a gig in Galway. They shared social, cultural and tribal occasions. Builders turned up in force at Fianna Fáil weddings and vice versa. They liked each other’s company and shared a common outlook. Builders became part of the Fianna Fáil family. Galway was merely an annual tribal war dance.
