Flynn's wife got EUR87,000 in grants

Former EU commissioner Pádraig Flynn's wife, Dorothy, has been paid over €87,000 in grants for planting trees on land whose purchase was investigated by the planning tribunal.

Some of the money Ms Flynn used to buy the land near Killala, Co Mayo, came from the £50,000 cheque property developer Tom Gilmartin gave to her husband in 1989, the tribunal has already established.

Now it has emerged that Ms Flynn got €65,378 in afforestation grants in 1998 and €21,793 in 2003. She will continue to receive grants on the land, which cost her only €47,700 to buy, until 2017.

It has also emerged that Ms Flynn did not own the land at the time the original application for a forestry grant was made by the previous owner in February 1997.

Ms Flynn bought the land in December 1997 and approval to plant, based on the original application, was given in March 1998.

At the time, according to Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan, grant applicants did not have to submit title documents before grants were paid. Instead, this information was collected before payment of the premium.

In this case, title documents were submitted to the department's forestry service in March 2000 and these showed clearly that Ms Flynn was the registered owner of the land before the grant was awarded, Ms Coughlan told Green TD Trevor Sargent in a recent written parliamentary answer.

Ms Flynn used the same planting "prescription" drawn up by a firm for the application by the previous owner. According to Ms Coughlan, this was the "only instance" where other records were used in connection with a second application.

The tribunal heard last year that Ms Flynn was probably the person who negotiated Mr Gilmartin's cheque at the Flynns' AIB branch in Castlebar in June 1989. The money was shifted to bogus non-resident accounts and later the Flynns' daughter, Beverley, invested half of it on behalf of her parents in overseas funds.

The money was later brought back to accounts in Ireland, which were used to buy the land at Coolanass in Ms Dorothy Flynn's name for £37,553.

Under the terms of the EU grant scheme, applicants had to show they earned at least 25 per cent of their income from farming. Ms Flynn qualified on the basis she earned €1,100 a year from haymaking on the land, and had no other income. Her total grant entitlement over 20 years is €178,000.

Ms Flynn told the tribunal she had never seen the farm, nor set foot on it. She never farmed it in any meaningful way and did not know who had found it to buy for her. The Flynns deny the Gilmartin money was used to buy the land. "Little if none" of the money was used for this purpose, Mr Flynn told the tribunal.