An ending he didn't plan

Any sympathy felt for George Redmond as he goes into custody in Clover Hill should be tempered by the memory of his delaying …

Any sympathy felt for George Redmond as he goes into custody in Clover Hill should be tempered by the memory of his delaying tactics and self-pity, writes Paul Cullen

'Will anyone ever go to jail for it all?" This is the question people have been asking of the tribunals and other investigations into corruption for years, yet it still leaves a sick feeling in the pit of the stomach to see a 79-year-old hauled off to prison. There George Redmond was, shambling along to Clover Hill Prison last Wednesday, trying to support himself with an umbrella while handcuffed to a garda. No more tennis, no more gardening, no more trips to Spain, just a book of poetry for company. An old man learning ignominy late in life.

Redmond will need his Percy Shelley to pass the coming month in Clover Hill, where most of the inmates are one third, even one quarter of his age. The oldest inmate in the Irish prison service, bar a few clerical sex abusers, he has nothing in common with his new neighbours - different age, different class and, most of all, different crime.

But before we start to feel sympathetic towards the first senior bureaucrat to be convicted of corruption in our State, let us consider his legacy.

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It is difficult today to conjure up the world of George Redmond, 14 years after he retired from public service and more than 60 years after he began his career as a junior clerk in Dublin Corporation. He was never a household name, and even his most senior job title, that of assistant Dublin city and county manager, is a mouthful that evokes visions of smoke-filled rooms and councillors with the arse out of their trousers.

Yet Redmond was up there with the movers and shakers in our capital city, especially in the doldrum years when, let's face it, not much was moving or shaking. Hard as it is to credit now, the frail pensioner in the dock this week once ran local government in Co Dublin with an iron fist, inspiring fear in his staff and puzzlement in anyone with an interest in good planning. When he wasn't throwing tantrums to get his way or cow his juniors in the office, he was lecturing councillors on their responsibilities. When it came to most things, George knew best, and God help the hapless soul that dared to contradict him.

But when it came to planning in Dublin, George really did know best. Having spent his entire career with Dublin Corporation and the county council, from 1941 until he retired as assistant city and county manager in 1989, he knew every by-law and planning procedure in the book. What the former pupil of "Joeys" Christian Brothers School in Artane (Charles Haughey was in the class behind him) lacked in formal education, he made up in native intelligence. He mastered the complexities of property and planning law and put this knowledge to good use, dispensing "advice" to the ever-growing stream of developers and landowners who beat their way to his door over the decades. Redmond became an expert in devising shortcuts, legal manoeuvres and planning ploys, all designed to smooth the way towards rezoning or planning permissions.

"J.R.", as his friends knew him, was the man to bring buyers and sellers of land together, to dispense hot tips about planning information, to check the files in the back office. He knew when the new maps were ready and he was the first to know where the council planned to build roads and lay sewers. His powers could be expressed negatively as well as positively. He could, for example, decide to order enforcement procedures on developers to make safe a building, and he had a crucial input in determining the level of contribution levied on builders for roads and sewerage.

All this advice-giving was his "extra-mural activity", he told the Flood/Mahon tribunal, while insisting that none of the rewards he received were solicited. Between 1979 and 1989 alone, the tribunal established, £1.2 million passed through his many bank accounts. His salary at the time was £29,000. In 1988, the year before he retired, his investments totalled £660,000, or more than 35 times his annual after-tax pay.

His biggest benefactors were Tom Brennan and Joe McGowan, in their time the largest house-builders in the State. Last year, the Flood tribunal found that Brennan and McGowan made a number of corrupt payments to former Fianna Fáil minister Ray Burke.

For years, Redmond told the tribunal, he would collect £300 to £400 a week from Brennan in return for consultancy advice on lands. Brennan stretched the tribunal's credulity by claiming the money represented the proceeds of bets he placed on Redmond's behalf with his own money. At least Redmond didn't try to hide behind this pretence, admitting that he received £250,000 over several decades.

Brennan and McGowan always seemed to be one step ahead of council officials acting on the complaints of angry residents whose estates remained unfinished. Availing of the provisions of planning legislation, they took to suing the council whenever their planning applications were refused. One of their companies, Grange Developments, picked up the largest compensation award in the history of the State in this way. The £1.9 million cheque was signed by George Redmond just before he retired.

Redmond has told the tribunal and the Criminal Assets Bureau about other benefactors, though not enough to explain the massive sums of money sloshing around his accounts. There was Matt Gallagher, the Sligo builder and backer of Charles Haughey, who built Redmond's house in Castleknock and later added a two-storey extension on the cheap. And the hotelier, P.V. Doyle, who threw him a few hundred quid each Christmas.

Tom Roche senior, the founder of National Toll Roads, gifted Redmond £10,000 to "hurry up progress in little bits of way" on the building of the West Link toll bridge.

Yet success never relieved Redmond of the insecurities rooted in his humble origins, and he became notorious for his frugal ways and love of "freebies". He was said to wear a coat at home to save on heating bills. The county's leading bureaucrat took his lunch to work every day in a sandwich-box - except when someone else was buying. He wheedled his way about the city, picking up theatre tickets, filling his petrol tank, and getting his weekly groceries in a cash-and-carry, all paid for by others. He lived on £20 a week and boasted about how he cut this down to £8 during one week's holiday in the Canaries.

One of his builder friends, Batt O'Shea, best summed up Redmond's miserly streak. The two were golfing partners but their games were ruined for O'Shea because Redmond would spend all day looking for lost balls.

"It was like 'twas gold to him," O'Shea recalled. O'Shea alleviated the problem by throwing £200 at Redmond to buy golf balls.

Colleagues swapped jokes about his stinginess - when he wasn't looking. When one official spotted a JCB digging in the street one day, he remarked to a colleague: "George must have lost a shilling."

To the end, this trait persisted. During his spell in the witness-box in Dublin Castle, he pleaded with Mr Justice Flood for a longer lunch-break so he could go home to Castleknock, where his wife, Maureen, would fix him lunch for free. The chairman rejected his request but a local café-owner, touched by his plea, gave him a free lunch. What he hadn't bargained for was Redmond, who is in receipt of a €40,000-a-year pension, turning up on successive days looking for a repeat deal.

With little inclination to spend money, Redmond landed large sums on his children and grandchildren. But the self-confessed "heavy saver" also hoarded cash in his home at Castleknock: £35,000 in the bathroom in 1984, £12,000 in the kitchen, £8,000 in cheques. He kept a variety of bank accounts under false or assumed names - Seoirse O Reamoinn, Seoirse Mac Reamoinn - while also using the addresses of a brother-in-law in Belfast, a sister-in-law in England and a cousin in Spain. But as he told the tribunal about the money: "I never did anything with it."

Redmond was interviewed by gardaí investigating corruptionallegations around the time his working career ended in 1989, and emerged unscathed. But his retirement was ruined as the drumbeat of allegation grew louder by the year. Retired building executive James Gogarty, whose allegations about Ray Burke led to the establishment of the Flood tribunal, claimed the former official got money from his former employers. Soon the newspapers were knocking at his door.

He tried to fend off the tribunal with a variety of legal challenges but on February 19th, 1999, he was arrested by the Criminal Assets Bureau as he returned on a flight from the Isle of Man. Detectives found he was carrying a bag stuffed with £300,000 in cash and cheques. He later had to sell the family home to meet a £782,000 settlement with the Revenue Commissioners. A conviction on tax offences followed and then there were the proceedings involving garage-owner Brendan Fassnidge, which led to this week's conviction.

Vanity, self-pity and a lack of remorse characterised Redmond's public utterances as the net closed in. He boasted to the tribunal how he had created more than 4,500 acres of parkland around Dublin, sounding like Louis XIV as he exclaimed: "I was the council; I had the powers." The payments he received were a "sword of Damocles" he had hidden, and "I lived with that sword over my head and it obviously has ruined my life".

Under pressure from Mr Justice Flood, he did express "deep regret" for his actions. But he then negated that contrition by parlaying requests for his phone records. When tribunal lawyers obtained his diaries, they found them to be blank. He declared just eight of the 33 accounts the tribunal eventually discovered. He continued to be vague about the donations he received but, as Mr Justice Flood noted, he knew his financial situation "down to the last penny".

Besides, he never did do "a Frank Dunlop". Dunlop, confronted by the undeniable evidence of his own bank accounts, walked away from the lies and the weasel words and "fessed up". Redmond, though finding himself in a similar situation, couldn't bring himself to do this, at least not to the tribunal. By owning up only to whatever scraps of evidence the tribunal lawyers could dredge up, by refusing to provide full disclosure of his contacts with developers and by failing to comprehend the moral black hole at the heart of his universe, Redmond wasted the tribunal's time and our money.

If he has received justice late in the day, it is because he has delayed the arrival of that day for as long as he could. And if he can't say sorry, why should we?