Gilmartin tells of threatening encounter with Sinn Féin councillor

Property developer Tom Gilmartin told the Mahon tribunal that he was sure a man who threatened him in a Clondalkin pub was Sinn Féin councillor, Christy Burke.

Mr Gilmartin described an encounter with three men dressed in black and wearing dark glasses, in Finches pub in Clondalkin in 1990.

He told tribunal counsel Pat Quinn SC that he was summoned to a meeting in AIB bank in the autumn, but was then taken by taxi to the west Dublin pub by developer Owen O'Callaghan. The pretext for the trip was to meet local residents who were interested in discussing the developers' Quarryvale plans.

However, when they arrived at the pub they did not meet residents, he said, but sat at a table and waited until the three men in black arrived.

Mr Gilmartin said one of the men took a seat at the table and Mr O'Callaghan told him to listen to the man.

"He said: 'I'm the Sinn Féin representative for this area' and he says, 'you are on our patch . . . we've got a file on you . . . and my advice to you is to get out of it'," Mr Gilmartin said.

"So I said to the bloke, 'if it's a f***ing threat, you better carry it out'."

Mr Gilmartin said he identified Mr Burke later from a photograph.

Mr Quinn highlighted a statement to the tribunal from Mr Burke in which he said he never met Mr Gilmartin, had never attended a meeting in relation to the Quarryvale project and was a councillor for the north inner city and not for the Clondalkin ward. He suggested that Mr Gilmartin might be confusing him with another Sinn Féin councillor, who looked similar.

"He would have to be a total identical twin down to his teeth, and that's unlikely," Mr Gilmartin said.

The tribunal also heard that Mr O'Callaghan had denied the meeting.

Mr Gilmartin told Mr Quinn that he had begun taping conversations after he received this threat and had hidden a microphone in a briefcase. Unfortunately, he said, his son had destroyed the tapes.

He said Mr O'Callaghan had often eavesdropped on his conversations and recounted an incident in a hotel, in the early 1990s, when he went to the toilets with his solicitor Séamus Maguire and Mr O'Callaghan was hiding in a broom cupboard.

"We heard this rattling and when I looked, here he opened the door of the broom cupboard and fell out of it," he said.

He also told the tribunal that he received a phone call from an anonymous banker in 1998 telling him that Bertie Ahern had £15 million in an off-shore account. He said the caller told him Mr Ahern and Albert Reynolds had accounts in Jersey, Liechtenstein and the Dutch Antilles. He passed the information on to the tribunal because he was asked, but he was not sure if he was being "set up".

He also said that another anonymous caller told him not to get involved when businessman Denis Starry O'Brien claimed he paid Mr Ahern £50,000 on behalf of Mr O'Callaghan, in the Sunday Business Post. Mr O'Brien subsequently lost a libel case brought by Mr Ahern, in 2001.

"There were several efforts made by the Business Post and Mr Connolly to get me to comment," he said. "I categorically refused."