When Seán FitzPatrick emerged from the Criminal Courts of Justice yesterday to make a statement to the media, he made a point of thanking his lawyers.
After praising his immediate family for their support, he said: "I would of course especially like to thank my legal team; solicitor Michael Staines, senior counsel Michael O'Higgins, junior counsel John Fitzgerald and Gavin McCormack for their dedication and hard work," he said.
O'Higgins is a former journalist who worked at Hot Press and Magill – where he secured a famous interview with criminal Martin Cahill, known as The General – before becoming a barrister in the late 1980s.
From Bray, Co Wicklow, O'Higgins is also an author who has twice won the Hennessy XO prize for emerging fiction; in 2009 for his short story The Migration and in 2007 for his story The Great Escape .
O’Higgins took silk in 2000 and has become one of Ireland’s most high-profile criminal defence barristers. He represented the prominent republican Thomas “Slab” Murphy in a taxation case and acted for former senator Ivor Callely in his action aimed at overturning the findings of a Seanad committee.
O’Higgins also conducted a famous cross-examination of the lobbyist Frank Dunlop at the Mahon planning tribunal.
Tall and deep-voiced, O’Higgins has a big courtroom presence and rhetorical skills which he put to effective use at the Anglo trial.
He continually stressed FitzPatrick’s distance from the Maple transaction and from the executive day-to-day running of the bank.
He highlighted his open stewardship of the board, the minimal level of information he was given about the July 2008 deal and the full co-operation his client had given gardaí.
In his closing speech, O’Higgins compared the July 2008 deal to 1916 in reverse. Everyone was “gloriously happy” with the unwinding of Quinn’s stake in Anglo “until the climate changed”.
He went on: “It’s sort of like 1916 in reverse, when the lads were taken out of the GPO they were virtually spat upon by the citizens of Dublin and treated risibly and with contempt. Then when they were executed they became heroes and if you believed everyone who was in the GPO or the vicinity of it.
“But history is being rewritten on this. Everybody was relieved and happy and didn’t have a problem and then, in the light of subsequent events, and in the light of what I would describe as a degree of viciousness and unfocused anger, this thing came to be looked at in a different light and the ground started to shift.”
