ON A Monday afternoon in early January 2009, gardaí forced their way into an apartment in the Clancy Strand area of Limerick and arrested three Brazilian women, whom they suspected of running a brothel, writes HARRY McGEEPolitical Correspondent
The following day, Tuesday, January 13th, all three appeared before Limerick District Court. Judge Tom O’Donnell convicted the women and imposed suspended six-month sentences. He also directed them to leave Limerick within three days.
The raid on the brothel would set off of an unusual sequence of events over 13 months that would eventually force the city’s best-known politician, Minister for Defence Willie O’Dea, to the brink of resignation.
Later that week, the Limerick Leaderreported a new angle to the story. The registered owner of the apartment on Clancy Strand was one Nessan Quinlivan. The name was immediately recognisable. He was one of two IRA men who had escaped from Brixton Prison in July 1991. The other was Pearse McAuley, who was later convicted for the manslaughter of Det Jerry McCabe in Adare in 1996.
Nessan Quinlivan said that he had no knowledge the apartment was being used as a brothel, an assertion that has never been questioned.
Quinlivan’s younger brother Maurice was an aspiring politician in Limerick, a declared candidate for the June 2009 local elections in the North Ward.
Two months after the event, on March 9th, Fianna Fáil launched its local election campaign in the Clarion Hotel. Mike Dwane, a reporter for the Limerick Leader, attended the event and approached O'Dea after the speeches. Dwane had a digital voice recorder which he held up visibly.
Quinlivan had criticised O’Dea that week for sending out letters to planning applicants using Department of Defence newspaper. He also criticised the cost of the six civil servants who were employed to help O’Dea with constituency affairs. The criticisms prompted a ferocious attack from the Minister, which began with a swipe at Sinn Féin.
“They are running a big campaign. The money from the Northern Bank must be stretching fairly far. Quote me on that.
“While occasionally we send out letters to planning applicants on the wrong paper, we have never been involved with anyone who shot anybody, or robbed banks, or kidnapped people.”
He moved on to a new line of attack: “I suppose I’m going a bit too far when I say this but I’d like to ask Mr Quinlivan is the brothel still closed?” he asked.
Dwane had been on holidays during January and was unaware of the story about the brothel.
“Do you know the brothel they found in his name and in his brother’s name down in Clancy Strand? . . . Did you not hear that? You better check with your sources. There was a house owned by him that was rented out and they found two ladies of the night operating in there in the last couple of weeks,” said O’Dea.
Dwane contacted Quinlivan seeking a response to O’Dea’s claim and also checked it out with the Garda. Quinlivan was reported in the newspaper the next day saying he was considering legal action against O’Dea “after the Minister for Defence claimed he part-owned a Clancy Strand apartment where a brothel was discovered”.
The only part of the interview quoted was the question to Quinlivan as to whether the brothel was still closed.
On April 9th, Quinlivan issued proceedings against O’Dea. He sought an injunction restraining O’Dea from repeating the allegation. He sought it under the provisions of a 1923 Act, the Prevention of Electoral Abuses Act, which created a criminal act of making a false statement about a candidate. Quinlivan also indicated that he was bringing separate proceedings against O’Dea claiming defamation.
On April 14th, O’Dea swore an affidavit for the injunction. While accepting he made the reported quote, he went on to say: “I must categorically and emphatically deny that I said to Mr Dwane that the plaintiff was a part-owner of the said apartment.”
He also said that there was not a shred of evidence to support Quinlivan’s claim that he was involved in a dirty tricks campaign.
At the hearing on April 20th, Quinlivan’s application was rejected by Mr Justice Cooke on the basis that a repetition of the claim was unlikely and also noted O’Dea’s denial that he claimed Quinlivan part-owned the apartment.
Dwane read the affidavit within 24 hours of the case and immediately realised that it did not tally with the O’Dea interview.
“I suddenly had a credibility problem, which if I had not recorded the interview might have hung on my word against a Minister’s in a court case,” he wrote this week. The affidavit, he recalled, was effectively “accusing me of making up the allegation”.
Within hours of reading the affidavit, Dwane brought his concern to Alan English, the editor of the Limerick Leader.
English ordered a transcript of the interview.
The timing of this first contact assumed a huge importance yesterday. It emerged that the first formal correspondence Quinlivan’s legal team received was on August 11th, some four months after O’Dea swore the affidavit.
Yesterday, English says that he made an initial, unsuccessful attempt to contact O’Dea to point out the difficulty. Initially, yesterday, he said he may have contacted O’Dea in late May. If that were the case, O’Dea had two problems. There would have been an onus on him under the 1923 Act to immediately correct the false statement to avoid a prosecution. And if his solicitors had been contacted in May, it would have meant a delay of almost three months in contacting the other side, which would have made nonsense of O’Dea’s statements this week that he had acted immediately upon learning of the error.
Later yesterday, however, both English and O’Dea confirmed, after checking their records that the first contact was on July 24th. English said that the paper’s delay in contacting the Minister was due to the fact that it also faced legal action.
O’Dea, recalled Dwane, was “taken aback” by the transcript when he read it and said he had made a genuine mistake. O’Dea said this week that he immediately corrected his affidavit. He was wrong in that respect – affidavits cannot be corrected.
What happened was that O'Dea's solicitors wrote to Quinlivan's legal team on August 11th stating that "important information has now come to light in relation to an interview with the Limerick Leaderjournalist.
“Having considered this information which is a partial transcript of the interview, [O’Dea] is happy to confirm that his memory of the interview was incorrect and he did in fact state to the journalist that your client was an owner or part-owner of the premises in question.
“. . . He readily and willingly concedes that in the heat of the moment he said something that he had not meant to say and which subsequently escaped his memory.”
It was a total concession and also clear that O'Dea was no longer in a position to defend the defamation proceedings. The matter was concluded on December 21st without going to hearing. The Minister accepted he had defamed Quinlivan and paid damages and costs to the Sinn Féin councillor. The Limerick Leadermade the recordings available to both sides that day.
In his explanations to the Dáil this week, O’Dea and Fianna Fáil relied heavily on a paragraph in the statement which stated: “It is not suggested by Mr Quinlivan that Mr O’Dea acted other than innocently in making such denial” in his affidavit. But it has been pointed out since then that Mr Justice MacMenamin in the High Court approved the settlement but was never expected, or asked, to rule on an affidavit used in an earlier injunction proceeding.
The case was reported in late December but subsequently fell from prominence. It returned to public attention in early February when Senator Eugene Regan accused O’Dea of perjury in the Seanad, reigniting a controversy that greatly gathered momentum this week.
In the Dáil this week, O’Dea accepted he made a mistake in the affidavit but could not bring himself to apologise for his slur against Quinlivan. He was finally forced into doing that by Seán O’Rourke on the News at One yesterday. By that stage, many colleagues in Fianna Fáil thought that it was too late. Last night’s resignation proved them right.
Caught On Tape
What O’Dea Said About Quinlivan
Extract from the transcript of the recorded interview between journalist Mike Dwane and Willie O’Dea on March 9th, 2009:
WOD:While occasionally we send out letters to planning applicants..... we have never been involved with anybody who shot anybody, or robbed banks, or kidnapped people. I suppose I'm going a bit too far when I say this but I'd like to ask Mr Quinlivan is the brothel still closed?
MD:Is the brothel still closed?
WOD:Is the brothel still closed?
MD:What brothel is that, Willie?
WOD:Do you know the brothel they found in his name and in his brother's name down in Clancy Strand?
MD:I never heard about that.
WOD:Did you not hear that? You better check with your sources. There was a house owned by him that was rented out and they found two ladies of the night operating in there in the last couple of weeks.
MD:Right.