For now, it's Tom Gilmartin's word against the rest, but the Mahon tribunal still casts a shadow over the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis, writes Paul Cullen.
Not for the first time, Fianna Fáil holds its ardfheis this weekend under something of a cloud. Delegates gathering in the Citywest Hotel to hear the speech of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, this evening have plenty to mull over from this week's evidence at the planning tribunal. Extortion demands, a death threat, numerous shakedowns and political payments that were never revealed until now - even by the standards to which we have become accustomed from the tribunal, it was an extraordinary week for allegations.
Of course, this cloud has been a long time coming for the Soldiers of Destiny. For years, senior figures have been palming off various allegations, saying they must be left to the tribunal to investigate. Now, finally, the tribunal is investigating and nobody is quite sure what will happen.
On previous occasions, the party could always push the likes of Ray Burke or Liam Lawlor out on the plank and then saw it off. However, Tom Gilmartin's allegations reach to the highest levels of Fianna Fáil, leaving fewer options for such damage limitation.
For the Taoiseach and for the Transport Minister, Seamus Brennan, the only politicians figuring in Tom Gilmartin's allegations who remain in the Cabinet, the stakes are particularly high. Ahern says he can't recall meeting Gilmartin, along with other ministers, in Leinster House in February 1989, as the developer has alleged; Brennan says he never attended any meeting with Gilmartin.
No Irish politician has so comprehensively excavated the space between memory and forgetting as Ahern, but even he will face serious questions if the tribunal eventually rules that the meeting, and the £5 million extortion demand that was allegedly made immediately after it, did happen.
In any case, it's not as though his contacts with Gilmartin were confined to this one disputed meeting. Along with Pádraig Flynn, Ahern had a number of meetings with the developer in his role as minister for labour. He also sent his friend, Cllr Joe Burke, to act as an intermediary.
Gilmartin was promising to create thousands of jobs but needed urban renewal tax breaks to make his development projects a success, so it was only logical that he would need to seek the support of Ahern and Flynn, who was minister for the environment.
The developer claims he first met the two men, as well as minister for finance Ray MacSharry, in 1987, more than a year before Ahern and Flynn acknowledge contact. MacSharry, who, like Gilmartin is a Sligo man, denies ever meeting the developer.
At this remove, a conflict about dates mightn't seem to add up to much. However, in January 1988, the cabinet decided to extend existing urban-renewal incentives by extending the boundaries applying in Dublin and by leaving them in force for an additional two years.
This move was of huge potential benefit to Gilmartin, who, with business partners Arlington Securities, was trying to develop a massive shopping centre at Bachelor's Walk. Only half this site had tax designation and the extension of tax incentives to the whole area would make a huge difference to the prospects for success.
So if the ministers met Gilmartin in 1987, as he claims, the cabinet decision could be seen as having been made in response to his lobbying. If there were no meetings until later in 1988, this wouldn't apply. There wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong about the government kowtowing to developers - and it wouldn't be the first or last time this happened - but it wouldn't look good given the subsequent course of events.
It isn't all bad news for Fianna Fáil. So far, Gilmartin has merely restated the allegations he has made on other occasions in earlier years. That leaves Flynn with serious questions to answer, but the Mayo man is no longer in politics. Liam Lawlor also faces the lash from Gilmartin, but where's the surprise in that? As for Ahern and other ministers who allegedly attended the February 1988 meeting with the developer in Leinster House, the issue here is a conflict of evidence, not a substantive allegation of corruption.
As on previous occasions at the tribunal, there isn't much in the way of supporting evidence. The tribunal hasn't yet shown us Gilmartin's diaries, but Lawlor is already claiming they are "fit-ups".
So, mostly, it's a case of Gilmartin against the rest. A similar David-versus-Goliath scenario didn't stop James Gogarty, the octogenarian pensioner who blew the whistle on Ray Burke, having his story accepted by the tribunal in full.
Also, in Gilmartin's case, there is the evidence of Mary O'Rourke, who appears to back up his evidence with her recollection of the Leinster House meeting. Just how one government minister can remember a meeting she says she only briefly attended, when so many of her male colleagues remember nothing is, to say the least, baffling.
It will, of course, take the tribunal years to report. Until then, the politicians can replace their familiar imprecations to "let the tribunal investigate" with calls to "let the tribunal report". By which time the political cast of this intrigue will be history.
The large tribunal hall in Dublin Castle has been fuller than ever for Gilmartin's evidence this week. Not even in Gogarty's heyday was it a case of "standing room only" as occurred last Thursday. As in the case of Gogarty, most of those crowding into the public gallery belonged to the "elderly but angry" category, the sort of people who have paid taxes all their lives and are appalled to find out what was going on all those years.
However, the political strategists know that public interest in the tribunal ebbs and flows. Waves of outrage at a particular revelation tend to subside quickly, to be replaced by thickening layers of cynicism. All the revelations about Ray Burke and Frank Dunlop made not one jot of difference to the last election, which was fought on other issues.
The current hearings, which will see a number of present and former ministers parade their amnesia in the witness box, will be long adjourned by the time the local and European elections take place in June. There is no danger that Ahern will have to miss hosting the EU summit in Dublin because of a prolonged sojourn before the tribunal.
As for Gilmartin, he remains the man who lost everything and therefore has nothing more to lose. He wanted to build Europe's largest shopping centre at Quarryvale but ended up with a heap of debts. Instead of cashing in on the Celtic Tiger, he ended up being chased by the taxman.
We learned this week a little about the man who is now making such extraordinary allegations against senior politicians. Throughout this time, Gilmartin also had to cope with the slow decline in health of his wife Vera, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. Even when he was in the throes of promoting Quarryvale and Bachelor's Walk in the late 1980s, he disliked spending too long away from their home in Luton, he told the tribunal this week.
As his business deals started to fall apart, so his wife's condition deteriorated. Minding her became a full-time occupation. Finally, Gilmartin decided to return to the country he left in bitterness in 1957, settling in Cork, where his wife now lives in a nursing home.
We still know relatively little about the roots of his business success in England. Gilmartin said this week that he never worked as a builder, in spite of the tendency to describe him so. He made his fortune in mechanical handling, relying on a photographic memory to master the details of complex manufacturing systems.
"We had the winter of discontent and the strikes and then we had Maggie Thatcher, \ took on the unions and there was absolute chaos, strikes which in turn forced me out of the engineering company because we just couldn't work," he recalled.
Gilmartin liquidated his assets and invested in office blocks in Milton Keynes. He mixed with major figures in the British property scene and gained a reputation as a deal-maker skilled at assembling sites for development. In the mid-1980s, he bought Clandeboye Shopping Centre in Northern Ireland, a move that led him to think about investing in the Republic. He had further sentimental reasons for directing his energies to the land of his birth, he recalled:
"The majority of the people begging on the Underground [in London] were Irish. I felt I could do something for them. We were scoffed at for the idea of bringing investment to Ireland. It was a joke."
Thus began the odyssey in an unfamiliar country that was to lead, ultimately, to the witness box of the planning tribunal.
"I was away for 50 years and when I came to Ireland it was just a rare occasion I visited Dublin other than to drive through it from Dún Laoghaire," he recalled.
Gilmartin knew no-one and was unfamiliar with the ways of Irish politics. His bank manager introduced him to garageowner Brendan Fassnidge, who has subsequently admitted paying a bribe, and Lawlor, who has since been jailed three times for failing to co-operate with the tribunal. Clearly, he wasn't in the best of company.
Worse, his arrival coincided with the last phase of Charles Haughey's rule, when Fianna Fáil politicians such as Ray Burke were assiduously collecting money from their business friends and passing very little on to the party.
One of the main issues the tribunal will have to decide is whether Gilmartin went along with this culture. If he did, was this by choice or was he forced to pay money to politicians?
Another embittered Irish exile, James Joyce, once declared that "silence, exile and cunning" were his only defences. Having forsaken silence and exile, Gilmartin has only his cunning to rely on.