by Tom Reddy
Byrne’s wife, Kathleen Watkins, came from a strong Fianna Fáil background, a point made to reporters by supporters of other candidates in the field. Had her Fianna Fáil influence rubbed off on him?
Fianna Fáil have very little to do with it. I will be an independent candidate if it comes to that. They’ve assured me about that. I’ve always remained completely unpolitical. That’s why people love me.
The developer and promoter Harry Crosbie, owner of the Grand Canal Theatre and O2 Theatre, a friend of Byrne’s, joined him as he spoke to reporters. He told them that both he and the RTE radio presenter Joe Duffy, who had been a reporter on Byrne’s morning radio programme for many years, had joined Byrne for a drink before the premiere and urged him to run for the Presidency. ‘Go, Gaybo, go, that’s what I’ll say. I think people love him, and they cry out for him in the night,’ he said.
To which Byrne quipped, ‘He’s already offered me €50 without conditions!’
Crosbie would later offer to host a concert at his O2 Theatre, which, it was estimated, with a maximum capacity of 14,000 and tickets at €50, would raise €700,000—almost the maximum spending allowed for a presidential campaign. It was suggested that top-name acts—perhaps U2, who had presented Byrne with a Harley-Davidson motorbike on his final ‘Late Late Show’ in 1999—would play free of charge.
Funding a campaign with a spending ceiling of €750,000 was always going to be an issue, but Byrne had said he had received lots of offers of financial support. He was also RTE’s top presenter and top earner, with a famed Saturday night chat show and a weekday morning chat show, both of which were major earners for RTE.
In his autobiography, The Time of My Life, in a chapter entitled ‘The Betrayal’, Byrne spoke of his friendship with Russell Murphy, his accountant.
He was one of my closest friends, a father figure, yet he embezzled my life’s savings. After he died I found that not only was all my money gone but I was in serious debt.
Byrne chronicles fondly his memories of this larger-than-life character who was blessed with a deep and sonorous voice, great generosity and a pithy wit and charm. He was an attentive and generous godfather to Crona, and when Suzy’s godfather died Murphy ‘adopted’ her as a godchild too. It emerged after Murphy’s death that he had been taking clients’ funds for the last eight years of his life and that £1½ million was missing. ‘And unfortunately for me,’ wrote Byrne, ‘I was one of them.’ He felt bitterly betrayed.
Byrne didn’t say how much he had been swindled out of, or how much in debt Murphy had left him. The Revenue Commissioners reminded him that Murphy had been his accountant and not theirs, and they could not be responsible for tax cheques that Byrne had made out in good faith to Murphy but that were never passed on. He was in tax arrears for ten years.
Murphy had also taken out a loan of £65,000 on Byrne’s house in Dublin, though not on his Donegal cottage, but he had made some repayments in the last two years of his life.
This good man from this good bank would not tell me how much was outstanding. All he would say was that the loan was now ‘manageable’. (Mind you, he didn’t say whether it was manageable for them or for me!)
What Byrne was to reveal next passed without comment at the time his book was published but would have led to intense scrutiny by the media were he to run for the highest office in the land. Times had changed, and all banking issues, particularly special treatment by bankers, would have prompted a round of queries as the media dug into Byrne’s business dealings. He continued:
He asked me to write him a letter setting out my side of the story. I wrote the letter and delivered it. The man from the bank rang me at ‘The Late Late’ office and told me the debt had been written off. I could come down and collect the deeds on the house any time I liked, on condition that I never revealed either his name or that of his bank. I saved the information for Kathleen until I got home that evening. The situation called for a few tears of relief.
In public Byrne spoke only occasionally about the theft of his life’s savings, but when he did he never discussed the amount, only speaking with understandable bitterness about the betrayal. Over the next twelve years, he redoubled his efforts to build a pension chest. Like most high earners, he had his own company to channel his RTE fees in the most tax-efficient way.
In 2008 the Irish banks spectacularly collapsed, and Byrne found himself among the thousands of private investors who had put their belief and their savings into the supposed blue-chip companies. ‘What has happened in this country is putting me under pressure,’ he revealed a few weeks before his name was publicly speculated on as a presidential candidate.
I never had a pension in RTE, so we invested in what we believed were blue-chip stocks—AIB, Bank of Ireland, Anglo—and all of them have been wiped out.
He was one of the more famous faces, looking extremely downcast, pictured at an extraordinary general meeting of the shareholders of Anglo Irish Bank in 2009 as they were officially informed of the new bargain-basement values of their shares, which had previously soared year after year, vastly outperforming the markets of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years.
He also invested in the Quinlan Private group, run by a former tax inspector and then developer, Derek Quinlan, which cut a swathe through Irish and European property markets but whose investment values crashed. Byrne’s only public comments about these investments, which are now in the portfolio of the National Assets Management Agency, are that they are under ‘severe pressure’ and are ‘a millstone around our necks.’
Quinlan, a large-framed, affable man, is a friend of Byrne and is known to have other wealthy showbiz investors, including the founders of Riverdance, John McColgan and Moya Doherty. Quinlan would put together a syndicate of people to buy a property—one of them the famed Savoy Hotel in London—and then open his contact book to seek support from investors and banks. Byrne and others have not provided details about which investments they made. According to Byrne, speaking with remarkable honesty as a culture of blame and finger-pointing sprang up throughout the country (and invariably with the finger pointed at someone else):
Again and again journalists seem to think that Derek Quinlan was running some sort of Bernie Madoff scheme. But he wasn’t involved in anything of that kind at all.
We went in with our eyes open. He took a fee and his company ran the property, collecting the rents and doing all that. The problem we now have is that when the original loans were made the buildings were valued at a certain figure. The loans are being repaid, the tenants are paying their rent, but the banks have changed the ‘loan to value’ ratio, saying the buildings are only worth half the original amount that was borrowed.
All you can say is ‘Well done, Sherlock’, but because the building is no longer worth what it was they are saying, ‘We need more money’, and that is how they are screwing everybody. The loan-to-value thing should be tested in the High Court. It has been the ruination of so many people, and that is the nub of the problem. Yes, it is putting us under pressure.
I had a long run of very good years. I invested in absolutely watertight stuff: AIB, Anglo Irish and Guinness, all the stuff you were told couldn’t go wrong. And that is all gone! It is wiped out. And it is the same all over the country for people of my age and older. My sole worry is that Kathleen will have enough to see her through.
But nobody has been made accountable. And we thought we were paying these high-flying guys enormous sums of money because they were experts. And now we know that they knew nothing more than we did.
The situation is serious. I am frightened for people of my generation. They have introduced this constant, low-level anxiety into our lives, which we could well do without. It all hangs on a thread anyhow.
A presidential campaign would need money and someone with deep pockets, or a lot of generous friends, as the maximum anyone could now spend on their campaign was €750,000 and the most an individual could donate was €2,500 under the new limits introduced by the Minister for the Environm
ent and Local Government, Phil Hogan. However, the potential Labour Party candidate for the Park, Fergus Finlay, estimated that a minimum requirement would be at least €500,000, to include posters, travel and staffing.
While Byrne’s own company, Gabbro, had available funds of €312,000, according to accounts submitted for 2010, a self-funded campaign would require as much again. The media put the question to Fianna Fáil, which was offering him a nomination. Would Fianna Fáil financially back him? ‘No’ was the short answer: it was restricted in its spending. The party spokesperson said that it couldn’t just ‘write Gay Byrne a cheque for €200,000 and say “go for President.” The most we could give him as an entity is €2,500, but it’s all speculative at this point.’
Unaware of the media kerfuffle about Byrne’s attendance at the rock and roll musical, Vincent Browne had submitted his regular column that evening for the Irish Times. Opinionated, and dismissive of guests at times to the point of rudeness, he was always more entertaining than any guest on his panel while discussing the issues of the day on his late-night programme on TV3. The opinions of Browne, a former young Fine Gaeler fascinated by politics and with a long memory for detail, were always a source of interest, delight, controversy or insight, depending on the issue of the day.
The following morning’s Irish Times opinion page carried Browne’s feature article, provocatively headed ‘Gay would star in the Áras, not on the hustings.’ The article, which started off with an endorsement of Byrne and then meandered into a discussion about the ‘odd office’, revealed that, although Byrne’s name had first surfaced publicly on the 4FM radio phone-in poll, Browne had in fact raised the issue of his running for office previously with Byrne.
Gay Byrne would be a fine president. Perhaps more than anybody else contemplated now for the Presidency, he would represent the values and instincts of the Irish people: decent, conservative, cautious, respectful.
He would grow in office, learning the tone of the presidency and the protocols. Were he to be declared a candidate, I think he would rate far ahead of all the others in any poll because of the high regard people have for him and the affection he enjoys from the public. That is, initially, he would fare spectacularly in the polls.
As a friend of many years and as someone who gave him encouragement a few months ago to think about running, I am now fearful of what the campaign might do to him and to his sense of contentment.
For I think he would not be a good campaigner. He probably would make gaffes, like any candidate would, but he would not be good at correcting the gaffes. I don’t think he would be good on the hustings, defining what kind of presidency he would offer. There are no skeletons in Gay’s cupboard; in fact he may not have a cupboard, but that is not the point.
In short, Gay probably would be a bad candidate, but very probably a very good President, if fortunate enough to be elected.
Browne, who had the good humour to allow himself to be mocked in comedy sketches on his own programme, was a double-edged sword. He was strongly opinionated, and his endorsement and analysis would always be open to debate. His analysis of Byrne finding himself in an unfamiliar and opposite role—as interviewee rather than scrutineer—would be one that would not sit comfortably with him, he ventured, and it would be one that would be difficult for him to adjust to, particularly for a candidate who could be prickly when faced with criticism.
The Irish Times letters page had been filled during August with a variety of comments and opinions about the presidential election. ‘With a growing number of people past the average age for life expectancy convulsing the country with a will-he-or-won’t-he tilt at the presidency, should we consider a constitutional amendment inserting an upper age limit for the office to complement the lower age limit already in place?’, asked Patrick Cotter of St Stephen’s Street, Cork.
Chapter 7
THE TIPSTERS
Four thousand years ago a Babylonian priest plunged a ceremonial knife into a sheep and tore out its liver. It was a regular occurrence and part of the holy role of the high priests. The liver was considered to be the source of blood in the animal’s body and the basis of life. The organ was divided into different parts, each dedicated to a separate deity. By analysing each section of it the priests would, through its presentation and condition, interpret the will of the gods.
The Babylonian priest was a forerunner of the soothsayers, taking different forms and using different techniques to connect with the gods, using sacred rites and sacrifices to foretell the future. Extispicy, the study of organs for the purpose of divination, was hinted at in the Bible, and a refined form, haruspicy, continued through the Roman and Etruscan eras, when it was used to predict future events.
Lightning-strikes and the flights of flocks of birds (augury) were also used to divine the will of the gods. More than three thousand years ago the Oracle of Delphi was the most important shrine in Greece. People came from all over Greece and the Mediterranean to consult the priestess of Apollo, Pythia, to have questions about their future answered. She answered cryptically—much like astrologers in today’s newspaper columns—and, fortunately, if the supplicant didn’t like her answer she was prepared, for a second fee, to give a second opinion.
Throughout history humans have been fascinated, frightened and optimistic about what the future holds. For ancient kings and commanders, an informed prediction could launch an army or rein it back until the moment ‘augured’ well. Today’s politicians, whose grasp of power or fight for power depends on predicting the will of their constituents and the country at large, are obsessed with opinion polls. They have the same reverence for the results that the ancients surely carried in their hearts.
A winning poll will be barely referred to, even in hushed tones, for fear of bringing bad luck or of reversing the result in the next poll by displaying the confidence it secretly provides. A bad poll will be dismissed as a ‘snapshot in time’, and mitigating factors will be evoked, through gritted teeth, and issues pointed to that will, or can, be changed.
Because of the sophistication of polling techniques today, opinion polls are treated with the reverence once accorded to a haruspex with fresh chicken blood on his hands. Today, in Dublin, the new breed of haruspex sits in ordinary office buildings, behind computer screens. Instead of a pen of sheep or coop of hens ready for slaughter, their raw materials are census data, demographic breakdowns, access to call centres, statistical databases and a range of other information and supports.
The managing director of REDC, Richard Colwell, is young and enthusiastic in his manner; he sits forward confidently to engage with his clients, his warmth of manner belying the anonymity of his office. His office furniture is smart and functional; a computer and a stack of files sit on his desk. There are no distracting windows or pictures on his white walls: one, made of glass, looks out over an open-plan office. The only possible clue to his profession as an augur is the glass roof overhead—which looks straight to the heavens.
He set up REDC (Research, Evaluation, Direction, Clarity) in 2003, and since then it has had a series of the most recent successes in the political sphere: four of the five most accurate pre-election opinion polls in 2007. (The final poll had an average sample error of 1.4 per cent.) In 2009 it successfully predicted the result of the second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and in the local elections it had an average error of only 2.1 per cent—as accurate as the exit poll.
The Sunday Business Post has published monthly REDC political-satisfaction tracking polls, which are eagerly anticipated by politicians and political anoraks. One-off polls can occasionally be wrong, for a variety of reasons—rogue polls—whereas a change in attitudes in a tracking poll can be measured against specific events or subsequently identified as a significant change in trend.
Richard emphasises that the strength of opinion-polling is that it is as accurate as possible and reflects the country by means of quotas it establishes, based on census data for sex, age, region and social class.
Statistical theory proves that in a random poll of a thousand people, nineteen times out of every twenty the result will be accurate. The science is in ensuring that the sample is randomly generated, with carefully constructed questions and prompts. From those interviewed, about one in four sets of answers is selected for inclusion in the poll, based on a quota set by the company in accordance with constantly updated census and demographic data and previous experience.
A typical national political poll would be carried out by REDC at the beginning of the week and issued on Thursday the same week. Polls are conducted on both mobile and land-line phones. Only 2 per cent of the population have neither a land line nor a mobile phone, while 25 per cent have mobile only. The sample is divided equally between land-line owners and mobile owners, and polling is conducted from 2 to 9 p.m. so as to include those working regular hours and shift hours. Numbers are generated from ‘seed’ numbers from directories. A number is randomly selected and then a 1, 2 or 4 substituted for the last digit to provide a number for the call centre.
On Thursday 11 August the bookmakers Paddy Power released to RTE’s one o’clock radio news the result of an opinion poll they had commissioned from REDC. It was fascinating, prompting debate and conjecture, as it included people in, out and ruled out of the race for the Park.
The result showed that almost 40 per cent said they would have voted for David Norris, who had withdrawn from the race a week earlier. Gay Byrne came in second—even though he still hadn’t announced his decision on whether to run—with 28 per cent, with a strong showing of support from young people and from women. Michael D. Higgins followed, with 21 per cent, while Gay Mitchell for Fine Gael polled 13 per cent, with a strong showing in Dublin, where he had previously topped the poll to win a Dublin seat in the European Parliament. On a similar showing of 13 per cent was Brian Crowley, who also was not a runner, despite having expressed interest in the Presidency. As expected, he polled particularly well in Munster, where he had topped the poll in June 2004, receiving an impressive 125,539 votes and being elected on the first count. Seán Gallagher and Mary Davis both trailed, at 12 and 7 per cent, respectively. Dana, whose name had been featured as a possible contender, scored 6 per cent.
