Patrick Gallaher RIP
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Paddy Gallagher dies after short illness
March 16, 2006 07:47
The former property magnate, Paddy Gallagher, has died at the age of 54 after a short illness.He was the former head of the Gallagher property and banking group which collapsed in the early 1980s.
Aged 22, Patrick Gallagher took over his father’s property empire in 1974 becoming one of the country’s best known property speculators, living on a large stud farm and later buying and refurbishing Straffan House, now the K Club, in Co Kildare.
His property deals made newspaper headlines. He made £2m in 1979 by buying and then selling the same property bank on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin within months.
However, such deals involved servicing expensive bank loans. It was the failure of another deal on Stephen’s Green, that led the banks to send in the receivers. That was 1982 and the Gallagher Group, which by then included a banking operation, collapsed.
An investigation into the Northern subsidiary of that banking operation ultimately saw Mr Gallagher serve a jail sentence in the North after he pleaded guilty to fraud.
On his release he moved to South Africa, but his affairs were to resurface at the Moriarty Tribunal in 1999 when it emerged that 20 years before, he had loaned former Taoiseach Charles Haughey £300,000. He told the Tribunal he had done so out of a sense of duty.
Mr Gallagher’s funeral takes place tomorrow.
The man who reshaped Molesworth Street and went back on his fathers promise to build the RHA gallery. The scene where he meets senior BOI officals upon receiving his estate is recounted in the Destruction of Dublin and from other accounts I have heard Frank McDonalds account is extremely pasturised.
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In answer to your question PG was a class below the others; his stunt getting construction workers to go on a public protest citing that their jobs were in jeopardy after his illegal demolition of the Deane and Woodward classic on the corner of Dawson Street and Molesworth St is a prime example of his cynical and manipulative disposition.
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@Sue wrote:
Give the man’s family a chance to bury him before you start deconstructing his character. What the hell happened to the noble Irish tradition of not speaking ill of the dead while their body was above ground?:mad:
Shame
What’s noble about revisionism?
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@Sue wrote:
Give the man’s family a chance to bury him before you start deconstructing his character. What the hell happened to the noble Irish tradition of not speaking ill of the dead while their body was above ground?:mad:
Shame
I also have to agree. As much as our built environment is important and i by no means applaud Mr Gallaghers public record I think some people seem to level the value of a building to that of a human life. All these big nice and ultimately meaningless self righteous arguments can be made on how its justified but a little respect for his family at the very least wouldnt go astray. There will be time for dissection later.
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He was also not afraid to send in fellows in the middle of the night to knock a few heads – as happenrd when protestors were ejected at the Dawson St/ Molesworth building.
Nah sod the pussy-footing, and as for the piece by Gayle Killelea in the Sindo; ” this most gregarious of men”, “I was reminded of his great intelligence that day, when he came up with a number of marvellous and witty poems off the top of his head”, is this really the same man? Ah, hold on theres more: “When he returned to Ireland in 1999, he had some land in Wicklow that he was hoping would be rezoned, and when this happened (the word “if” did not exist in his vocabulary) he was going to sell it “. Indeed. -
A wide boy who got off lightly
By Mary Raftery
The Irish Times, March 23 2006
We wanted to know if it was libellous to call someone a brat. Legal brains pondered the matter. The conclusion eventually was that when applied to Patrick Gallagher, who died last week, it was a fair and accurate description. We could proceed.
It was March 1982, and it had been the then features editor Colm TóibÃn’s idea to plaster the headline “Patrick Gallagher, Property Speculator and Brat” across the cover of In Dublin magazine. I was writing the article, a sorry tale of Gallagher’s destruction of swathes of the city, but it was the headline which made the impact.
Patrick Gallagher had declined to be interviewed for the piece, but afterwards decided he did want to talk to me. I was summoned to a surreal evening in one of the large snugs of Ryan’s in Parkgate Street, where Gallagher was ensconced with business cronies and family members.
Between sessions of climbing on tables and singing loudly, he wanted to know why we had called him a brat. He wasn’t a brat, he said, and wanted us to take it back. Since he then immediately burst into song again, it was difficult to take him seriously.
However, there was nothing surreal about what Patrick Gallagher was doing to the capital city. Then just 30 years old, he had used it as his personal playground for the previous eight years and he was one of those children who liked smashing their toys.
The story of the Gallagher family is a parable of modern Ireland. The patriarch Matt was one of the great financial backers of Fianna Fáil. From rural stock in Sligo, he was one of the great wave of emigrants to the building sites of Britain during the 1940s.
He returned in the late 1950s, with enough money to capitalise on the nascent building boom, as Ireland under Seán Lemass began to open up the economy.
Matt built homes for the emerging middle classes, developing the Gallagher Group into the largest house-builders in the land. Hand and glove with Fianna Fáil, he constructed whole suburbs. There was an absolute belief that what was good for business was good for the country, which in turn was good for Fianna Fáil.
It was a small world. Des Traynor, infamous now as Charles Haughey’s accountant, was a director of the Gallagher Group. The seeds of subsequent scandals were already there, with the ownership of the company transferred in the early 1960s to an impenetrable parent company registered off-shore in the Cayman Islands.
But where Matt’s business was to build, his son Patrick preferred to destroy. On the death of his father in 1974, Patrick radically shifted direction. The oil crisis was biting and recession was on the way.
Cynical and hard-headed, Patrick sold off swathes of the Gallagher land bank in what he called “the less prestigious areas”. He scaled down the building operation and concentrated on the wealthier end of the market.
“We felt that in any recession there were people who would make it through,” he explained. “This time they were the civil servants, the accountants, airline people and so on. We simply catered for them.”
It was not long, though, before Patrick realised that you didn’t need to actually build anything at all in order to make money. You could buy city centre sites, demolish the fusty old buildings and sell them on. Never mind that rubble and years of dereliction replaced several of the finest examples anywhere of 19th century architecture.
As Patrick played Monopoly with Dublin streets, making vast money and flaunting it ostentatiously, it later transpired that he had also been engaging in extensive fraud. The Gallagher Group had over-extended itself in May 1982, the banks foreclosed and everything went bust.
Liquidator Paddy Shortall was appointed to examine the affairs of Merchant Banking Ltd, a Gallagher-owned bank. He discovered a series of apparently fraudulent transactions involving Patrick’s use of depositors’ savings to prop up his speculative empire.
The liquidator identified evidence for a total of 79 possible criminal offences under six different acts. It has always remained one of the great mysteries as to why Gallagher was never even prosecuted, let alone found guilty, for any of these.
The authorities in Northern Ireland, where he had a branch of his bank, did pursue him and locked him up for two years. However, his Northern operation constituted only a fraction of his activities.
Given the scale of Gallagher’s apparent fraud, he must have been convinced that he was untouchable, that the normal rules and laws simply did not apply to him. It is likely that such a belief was bolstered by his close connections to the then taoiseach Charles Haughey. After kindly providing him with an enormous gift of £300,000, Gallagher could be forgiven for believing he had the power of the land in his pocket.
There has been much talk this past week in the wake of Patrick Gallagher’s untimely death of Greek tragedy, of Icarus and his burning wings. The more mundane truth is that Gallagher was a wide boy with powerful friends, who in this country never had to pay for his crimes.
© The Irish Times
😮
Not that anything like that would ever happen now… No of course not, never! 😀
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@hutton wrote:
“When he returned to Ireland in 1999, he had some land in Wicklow that he was hoping would be rezoned”.
Not my words, but those of Gayle Killelea of the Sunday Independent; says it all really.
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@GregF wrote:
Ah yes ……that was the bloke who butchered parts of Dublin city so as he could line his pockets.
😀 I should not say this, but, the time will come in Cork when some of our gangsters will “pass on” and we will be able to speak the truth without being sued!!
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But if it’s the truth, why can’t you say it now?;) I guess you want to eat lunch in your town for some time to come.
Can anyone give a quick list of some of the, eh, more ‘notable’ elements of Mr Gallagher’s legacy? I know about Molesworth St. but there must be plenty more, and my copy of The Destruction of Dublin is out on loan.
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@kite wrote:
😀 I should not say this, but, the time will come in Cork when some of our gangsters will “pass on” and we will be able to speak the truth without being sued!!
Are you referring to deeds done in the not so distant past (ie, 20 or 30 years ago) or more recently?
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@phil wrote:
Are you referring to deeds done in the not so distant past (ie, 20 or 30 years ago) or more recently?
😮 Underhand deals that are still going on today im afraid, its after taking 20 – 30 years to get the past generation of gangsters to Dublin Castle where most come out laughing at joe and joan public. It may very well be another 20 years before we can bring the present jokers to book.
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@kite wrote:
😮 Underhand deals that are still going on today im afraid, its after taking 20 – 30 years to get the past generation of gangsters to Dublin Castle where most come out laughing at joe and joan public. It may very well be another 20 years before we can bring the present jokers to book.
Thanks Kite.
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