Irish plight in Britain motivated developer Gilmartin

Property developer Mr Tom Gilmartin said today he was motivated to begin development in Dublin in the late 1980s by the plight of improverished Irish people in England.

Mr Gilmartin began his much-anticipated evidence to the planning tribunal this afternoon.

The developer, who emigrated from his native Co Sligo to England in 1957, said at the time he decided to look into development opportunities in Dublin in the late 1980s, the employment situation in Britain was extremely bad. A combination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's crackdown on unions and the poor economic climate had left jobs hard to come by, he said.

Young Irish people were among the most vulnerable and thousands of them were "walking the streets" because they couldn't find work. The majority of people begging on the London Underground were young unemployed Irish men.

This motivated him to try to "do something to help them" by creating jobs in Ireland. However, all his attempts to secure financing from English companies were "scoffed at", he said.

He travelled to Dublin in 1987 and spotted a site at Bachelor's Walk on the River Liffey's north quays, which he regarded as an excellent opportunity. It could bring thousands of jobs to Ireland, he felt. The site had the added advantage of being included in the then recently-introduced Government urban renewal scheme.

He viewed the site with Mr Tom Dadley, a senior member of Arlington Securities, a major British property firm. They agreed to develop the site.

Upon returning to England, he secured promises of backing to the tune of £500 million sterling from a number of companies, including Arlington Securities and Scottish Widows, he said. Not all of this promised funding materialised, however.

He was eventually contracted by Arlington in 1987 to act as their representative in Ireland and to oversee the development of a shopping centre on the block between Bachelor's Walk and Middle Abbey Street and another extensive complex at Quarryvale in west Dublin. Under the contract, he was to be paid £250,000 over three years and would also receive 20 per cent of the gross profits of the two projects.

When he began original negotiations with Irish banks and lawyers, Mr Gilmartin said they tried to keep the project "reasonably quiet". This was because he felt if it was learned a major British firm was interested in developing Bachelor's Walk, "we would have been held to ransom, which in the end we were."

The centre was never built, nor was the development at Quarryvale. Mr Gilmartin claims repeated demands for money from politicians and a hostile atmosphere against him were to blame.