Dunlop tells of lobbying Labour leader

Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte went against planners' advice when voting for a controversial rezoning in south Dublin in 1992, the Mahon tribunal has heard.

Lobbyist Frank Dunlop said he believed this was the only time Mr Rabbitte, who was then a member of Democratic Left on Dublin County Council, went against the county manager's advice on a rezoning issue.

Council records show that Mr Rabbitte and two other Democratic Left colleagues voted for the motion to rezone 60 acres of land at Ballycullen in October 1992.

The motion was passed by 35 votes to 14.

Mr Dunlop claims he paid £11,000 to nine councillors in return for their votes on the rezoning. A week after the vote, he says he gave £3,000 in cash to Mr Rabbitte; he says this was not a corrupt payment.

Mr Rabbitte, who will give evidence later this month, has said he got £2,000 which was returned by cheque several weeks later.

In his evidence yesterday, Mr Dunlop said he lobbied Mr Rabbitte on a number of issues, including Ballycullen, some of which Mr Rabbitte voted against or abstained on.

He described the politician's attitude as "pragmatic" though ideologically, Mr Rabbitte was "at the other end of the spectrum" from the landowners he, Mr Dunlop, represented. Many of these people would have had a jaundiced view of Mr Rabbitte and would have been reluctant to meet him.

The general view was that Mr Rabbitte would be against rezonings. Left-of-centre parties were generally less pro-rezoning than others, the witness agreed.

Mr Dunlop said the task of securing support for rezoning became more difficult after the 1991 local elections, when one-third of councillors lost their seats, largely over rezoning controversies. Before the election, he could deal with the Fianna Fáil representation as a group and would often know in advance from the group whether it would be supporting a particular vote.

Later, however, he found himself dealing with "a whole new deck of cards" containing a number of "unknown quantities".

Patricia Dillon SC, for the tribunal, asked how he was able to establish in this changed situation whether the new councillors were bribable.

Mr Dunlop replied there was still a significant number of council members who were disposed to operating "the system" of rezoning.

Some of these gave him information, such as when a Fianna Fáil councillor told him that Fine Gael's Tom Hand was bribable.

Asked how much Mr Hand had sought in return for signing the Ballycullen rezoning motion, the witness said £5,000. The greater the "problem" the more Mr Hand wanted. He eventually paid him £2,000.

Mr Dunlop said he also paid councillor Don Lydon £2,000 for signing the motion. This arose from a discussion in which Mr Lydon had said: "What will you do for me?" he explained.

He paid the money over in the lobby of Mr Lydon's workplace at St John of God's in Stillorgan in October 1992.

He then travelled to Dundrum to pay Mr Hand. He made payments to the remaining seven councillors over the following fortnight. He made some of these payments in the lobby of the council offices on O'Connell Street.

He handed over the envelopes quite openly. Asked why, he replied: "How could anyone else know what was going on? I might have been giving them a memorandum or a schedule of a meeting."

The rezoning vote took place on October 29th. He never offered money to councillors unless they had solicited it in the first place. They did this in a variety of ways, some of them more direct than others.