Dublin County Council

One of the extraordinary things about it is that you've got these senior politicians who are delivering local – they're senior national politicians who are delivering local authority backing for various kinds of developments often.

They're clearly – so Ray Burke, although he's a government minister, is also a power broker in the Dublin County Council as it was at the time who can deliver the Fianna Fáil votes that will – and can deliver the public servants as well, the officials within those councils to ensure that developers get the go-ahead.

Can we talk about those developments in terms of the crisis that remains ongoing in, for instance, the housing market in the Dublin area in particular? Does the fact that development in Dublin from certainly – through the late 20th century and probably into the early 21st century was dominated by these corrupt – relationships that were brokered in backhander dealings between developers and politicians.

Does that affect the world in which people are trying to buy and rent housing today?

Well, I think the first point is that and to me it struck me as very significant that at the exact time that these major bribes were being paid to public officials and elected politicians, not just Ray Burke, but at least a third of the members of Dublin County Council were found by the tribunal to have taken bribes, many of them through a PR man called Frank Dunlop.

Bribes from 500 quid to 5,000 and Lawler was looking for, for instance, on one occasion in exchange for a map that Gilmartin was looking about to identify the landowners, of properties in West Dublin, at Quarryvale, where he wanted to live.

What became Liffey Valley, yeah.

I asked Mark to explain what motivated Frank, why he felt so deeply about the issue of planning in Dublin.

Yeah, so they came in the context of Dublin County Council was developing a new county development plan over the several years up to 1993.

This is basically a blueprint for how the county would develop, where we would build housing, where we would build industrial development, shopping centres, where there'd be green belts, where there'd be land for leisure use and so on.

And so planners and experts would draw up a plan.