Shedding a dim light on lobbying

`I have balls of iron and a spine of steel and if we can't make a shilling here, we'll make it somewhere else,' Frank Dunlop once quipped after seeing a crucial vote on Dublin County Council go against him.

But even attributes like these couldn't shield the lobbyist and former Fianna Fail press secretary from a torrid session this week before the lawyers of the Flood tribunal.

For once, the tables were turned on the suave, assured public relations guru. The basic operating principle of a lobbyist is anonymity, but here was Dunlop in the full glare of the media searchlight. No time for off-the-record briefings or delicate spindoctoring on this occasion, before a tribunal which clearly feels it has suffered more than enough at the hands of faceless media manipulators.

Not that the man from Kilkenny was ever stuck for words in the witness-box. As ever, he was articulate and precise, measured and polite, but no amount of damage-limitation or carefully-prepared mantras could hide the basic facts. Dunlop hid £175,000 from the taxman for up to seven years. He was unable to account in any de tailed way for what he did with this money, and huge questions surround his role in lobbying for the rezoning of Quarryvale.

Consider this mystery, for example. Dunlop was engaged by the developer Owen O'Callaghan in January 1991, but it was another nine months before O'Callaghan bought into the multi-million-pound project. Meanwhile, the man who was then running the show, Tom Gilmartin, was kept in the dark about Dunlop's involvement. What exactly was going on?

Notwithstanding this, the cheques flowed like a river from O'Callaghan to Dunlop's pocket: £40,000, £25,000, £15,000 and so on - no amount too large to fit straight into the lobbyist's trousers - and all on foot of the barest of invoices; no details; no breakdown of the work done; no VAT charged.

The key question for the tribunal is what Dunlop did for this money. Could he really be earning so much fee income from one client? Whatever happened, the job got done. Quarryvale was rezoned in 1993 and O'Callaghan got planning permission to build a large - though not as large as he would have liked - shopping centre on the site. The project came into the world as the Liffey Valley experience in 1998.

In his evidence, Dunlop shed a dim light on the world of political lobbying, an activity which craves publicity for fee-paying clients but shuns the more direct forms of attention.

His main job was to get O'Callaghan's objective, the rezoning of Quarryvale, over to the councillors and west Dublin communities concerned. This was accomplished through a lengthy round of "schmoozing", face-to-face meetings between O'Callaghan and individual councillors.

These took place over pints in the local pub, dinner in the Gresham Hotel or, for the lucky ones, lunch in Dublin's top restaurants. Dunlop picked up the tab, but would invoice the client later. He kept no records of these meetings, relying only on his phone as the tool for the job.

Some councillors also attended but did not participate in the "strategy meetings" organised by Dunlop, O'Callaghan and the project architect, Ambrose Kelly. Then there were the election leaflets printed for pro-Quarryvale election candidates, mostly Fianna Fail, the meetings with community groups and the rebutting of "campaigns of disinformation" by rival developers.

It was a sanitised version of what observers remember was a frantic period in local government. Job-starved deprived communities asked "what can you do for us?" when the developers came knocking; meanwhile, some councillors, Dunlop has confirmed, were whispering "what can you do for me?"

THE dramatic flourish at the end of his evidence this week, when he wrote the name of at least one bribe-seeking councillor on a sheet of paper which was then handed to Mr Justice Flood, was just what you'd expect from an accomplished public relations consultant.

It grabbed the headlines, but it also diverted attention from the witness to the councillors and set people guessing as to the identity of the councillor.

"And typical of Frank, too, to organise the Catherine Nevin verdict to coincide with his appearance at the tribunal," remarked one journalist, giving the lobbyist perhaps too much credit for media management.

Frank Dunlop is well used to flirting with controversy. His role as co-presenter of the RTE political discussion programme Later with Finlay and Dunlop was attacked by critics, who saw it as an advertisement for the lobbying work of the two presenters.

RTE first parted company with Dunlop, then axed the programme "for budgetary reasons".

The "balls of iron" remark was made in 1993 after he failed to get rezoning for lands in north Dublin on which he had acquired an option. Local residents in Baldoyle had vigorously opposed the move. His own stab at a bit of property speculation "didn't quite work out as I planned", he told the tribunal this week.

He was the first to tread a now familiar path leading to a career as a lobbyist. First, get a grounding in media matters as a journalist, then head for Fianna Fail for the party contacts.

Learn about the workings of the Civil Service while in government, then take your knowledge and contacts book to a public relations company for a vastly increased salary. Finally, set up on your own, possibly taking

some of the clients with you. Thus, Dunlop joined RTE after studying history and politics in UCD, where he was in the Fianna Fail cumann. He worked on current affairs programmes in Dublin and spent some time in Belfast in the early 1970s.

He joined Fianna Fail as press officer in 1974, having been recruited by Jack Lynch during the party leader's driver to modernise the party. When Lynch romped home in the 1977 election, Dunlop was appointed the first Government press secretary at the age of 29.

That year he married Sheila Tuite, a Fianna Fail activist from Co Meath, where the Dunlops now live. (Shefran, the shelf company formed to receive O'Callaghan's fees, is an acronym of SHEila and FRANk.)

He survived the Haughey putsch, remaining in this post until Fianna Fail lost the 1981 election. Under the coalition government, he moved to the post of information officer in the Department of Education, before resuming his old job under Haughey in 1982.

That Government was short-lived, and in 1983 the Fine Gael Minister for Education, Gemma Hussey, removed Dunlop from the post of press officer amid suggestions she was getting a "bad press". Dunlop stayed on in the Civil Service for a period, then joined Murray Consultants in 1986. Three years later, he formed his own company, Frank Dunlop and Associates.

Apart from O'Callaghan, Dunlop has carried out work for the Construction Industry Federation and the City West project, also in west Dublin. He also advised Fianna Fail under Albert Reynolds on improving its public image.

Journalists who know him describe Dunlop as "impossible to dislike" and "intensely ambitious". "Frank is great company; knowledgeable, funny, full of anecdotes and good lines. He is driven and enjoys being out there on the edge," says one.

For someone in public relations, Dunlop's tribunal performance last week was remarkably free of soundbites. You sensed the witness was anxious not to add his contribution to the pantheon of memorable tribunal quotes.

But he isn't finished yet, and there won't be any Catherine Nevin verdict to distract from his return to the witness-box next Tuesday.