The Trib

by David Kenny

  Things got moving. In January, Ruth interpreted Prince and issued an email to Sarkisian, ‘Dublin looks nice.’ More emails followed and by late February the little guy confirmed he was ready to big it up in Croker.

  WMEE got cracking. ‘Are they cool?’ Sarkisian wrote in one email, referring to another party involved in the promotion.

  ‘What did you mean by, “Are they cool?”’ lawyer Grainne Clohessy asked him.

  ‘Are they good to go, up to date,’ he replied.

  ‘As opposed to are they trendy?’ the lawyer inquired. Really, somebody needs to get down to the Four Courts and introduce these people to the Californian vernacular that has swept the rest of the world like a pandemic virus. Is we cool on that point?

  Later, Sarkisian mentioned that he ‘continued to reach out to them (concert buyers)’.

  ‘What do you mean by ‘reach out’?’ the judge asked. Cue Diana Ross entering from the back of the courtroom, all big hair, trailing a sequinned dress and singing into a Big Mama microphone. ‘Reach out and touch, somebody’s hand, make this world a better place, if you can.’

  Back on planet earth, the psyche of Prince was further dissected. Despite confirming for Dublin, he didn’t confirm for any of the other European gigs. Everybody was trying to interpret what he wanted. In one email sent to Sarkisian, Prince was referred to as ‘an incredible client’.

  The judge wanted that characterisation interpreted.

  ‘Is that that he was not to be believed or he was a good client?’

  ‘Oh, it’s that he was a very good client,’ Sarkisian replied. ‘He (the writer) was talking about his gift, as I understand it.’

  On 12 March, Sarkisian was invited to Prince’s house for dinner. ‘Dinners with Prince are interesting, usually filled with lots of discussion about worldly issues,’ he told the court.

  ‘He was very frustrated with album sales. He was looking to do something to break into markets he hadn’t been in in a long time.’ Further correspondence through his interpreter Ruth elicited that the little guy didn’t want any complimentary tickets given out for the Dublin gig. He wanted ‘everybody to pay seriously’.

  Through the evidence, a picture began to emerge of an ageing artist, well past the creative peak for contemporary performers, whose only solace was hoovering up large wads of cash, if only he could be bothered to get up off his rear end.

  March turned into April. Desmond was putting Goldring under pressure for specifics from Prince. Once again, Sarkisian went to dine at the little guy’s house. This time there were three others present, including Prince’s female friend, who was some class of a singer herself. Sarkisian didn’t want to discuss business in front of strangers, so the conversation presumably dwelt on worldly issues.

  At one stage, Prince left the room. Soon after, his security man ‘Raul’ came in and told poor Keith that dinner was over and it was time to leave. Sarkisian was asked in the witness box why he didn’t tell Prince to come back and eat his dinner.

  ‘You can’t tell Prince to come back to dinner, at least I can’t.’

  By June, everything was looking shaky. All eyes were on Prince’s gaff, hoping for some smoke signals or the belt of a snare drum; any kind of interpretation at all that he might suggest he was willing to fulfil his commitment to gig in Dublin. Sarkisian and his boss Marc Geiger finally got an audience with him to explain that cancelling would be a serious problem. They outlined that Denis was over in Dublin getting his knickers in a twist.

  ‘Tell the cat to chill, I’ll figure it out,’ Prince told them. The cat in question was smiling in the public gallery when that line was revealed. His €1.7 million in cream was looking more promising.

  By Thursday afternoon, Judge Peter Kelly was clicking into the groove. At a break in Geiger’s evidence, the judge remarked: ‘There’s no hurry, the rest of us are chilling.’ Check out the dude who’d come a long way from Lady Bracknell.

  Later, when reference was made once again to the function of Ruth the interpreter, the judge offered a description of Prince’s assistant. ‘His representative on earth, you might say,’ Judge Kelly opined. Now we were sucking diesel.

  On Friday morning, the case settled. By then, the lawyers were costing a king’s ransom, even by Prince’s extravagant standards. Judge Kelly asked the little guy’s lawyer Sreenen whether he had confirmation of the settlement from his client.

  ‘Does it mean the same in Princespeak as it does in English?’ the judge asked.

  Outside, Desmond expressed himself very pleased with the result.

  ‘The cat is very chilled,’ he said.

  The new courtroom dramedy from the makers of Airplane

  Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary met his match with Judge Peter Kelly in the High Court. There was always going to be one winner, and it wasn’t the chief of spin.

  28 March 2010

  They got off to a bad start. Michael O’Leary bounded up into the witness box and took the Bible in his right hand. His left remained rooted in a pocket. ‘Will you take your hand out of your pocket while the oath is being administered, please?’ Judge Peter Kelly asked. O’Leary complied, but it was obvious from the off that these two boys would never be sharing a few pints together.

  O’Leary was appearing in the High Court on Friday afternoon on foot of a request from the judge. On Wednesday, Kelly had been notified that an important letter sent by transport minister Noel Dempsey to O’Leary was not included in affidavits sworn by two solicitors on behalf of Ryanair. The airline, a frequent flyer to the courts, is involved in litigation over O’Leary’s perennial bugbear – passenger charges at Dublin airport.

  Judge Kelly felt he had been misled by the omission of the letter in question. He suggested that O’Leary hightail it down to the courts by 2 p.m. on Friday. Cometh the hour, there was the man, dolled up to the nines by his standards, in flannel trousers and smart jacket.

  The attraction of a court appearance by O’Leary is obvious. When lawyers or a judge are performing their functions properly, facts are parsed and analysed in a cold, clinical manner in court. Spin is squeezed out. Spin is O’Leary’s forte. He is by any standards a master communicator.

  Just last month, he performed Herculean feats by spinning the construction of a Ryanair hangar in Scotland into a scenario whereby Mary Coughlan, Aer Lingus and the Dublin Airport Authority were ineptly allowing jobs to flee the country. Different class, as our footballing brethren might say.

  Peter Kelly is no slouch at his own business. He presides over the Commercial Court. For the last eighteen months, he has been sifting through the embers of the Celtic bonfire. All manner of wide-boys, shysters, fools, not to mention lawyers and accountants displaying the ethics of vultures, have been parading through his court. Through his public comments and his work in general he has delivered a devastating critique of what transpired during the madness. He is a rare species at the current time, somebody who draws his authority from the performance of his duty rather than the status of the office he occupies.

  O’Leary told the court he was there on foot of the court report in the Irish Times the previous day (Thursday). The judge’s suggestion on Wednesday that he was misleading the court obviously didn’t prompt any underling to contact him that evening. He just read about it in the papers.

  ‘I’d like to add my own apology,’ he said, referring to the words of sorrow expressed by the two solicitors who swore the offending affidavits.

  ‘How is it that both of them were unaware of the letter?’ the judge wanted to know.

  ‘I did not give them the letter. They didn’t check the file,’ O’Leary said. He launched into one of his standard soliloquies about the crazy bureaucracy Ryanair has to endure from the assorted arms of the State. He said that if he had seen the affidavit he would have amended it in relation to a sentence which implied there had been no communication on the relevant matter with Dempsey, but he wouldn’t have included the letter anyway because it wasn’t relevant.

&n
bsp; Four times the judge asked him whether he would have included the letter.

  ‘Was I going to be told in affidavit form what the minister had decided?’ Kelly asked, with growing exasperation. O’Leary’s lawyer got up and tried to explain where his client was coming from.

  ‘You’re fencing with me now,’ the judge said. ‘He’s the chief executive of Ryanair. He calls the shots.’

  At one stage, the judge told O’Leary, ‘You’re contradicting yourself.’

  ‘I’m not contradicting myself,’ the spinmeister replied.

  O’Leary and his company have form with the judiciary. In 2005, Judge Barry White threatened to jail the Ryanair chief if he didn’t comply with a court order to reinstate a pilot to a roster. O’Leary drew back at the last moment.

  In 2006 Judge Thomas Smyth said that for only the second time in his career, he felt compelled to rule that witnesses had given false evidence under oath, referring to two Ryanair executives.

  Despite the rarity of the ruling, no charges of perjury were ever forthcoming from the DPP. Neither were the executives sanctioned by Ryanair. The ruling didn’t affect the bottom line, and beyond that, who, as Mickser himself might put it, gives a fiddlers?

  On Friday, the fireworks exploded when a lawyer for the Dublin Airport Authority produced a separate letter that O’Leary had written to Dempsey beseeching the minister to organise a review of the airport charges.

  ‘Both Judge Kelly and the DAA lawyers were critical of your delay in appointing an appeals panel,’ O’Leary wrote. Kelly hit the roof. He had made no criticism of Dempsey.

  ‘You are representing to the minister something you say I said. Where did I say that?’ he wanted to know. O’Leary made what the judge later referred to as a ‘pathetic’ attempt to justify the comment. By then, the spinmeister was transmogrifying into the squirmmeister.

  O’Leary said the offending passage was a misquote.

  ‘It is not a misquote, it is a lie,’ the judge said.

  The DAA lawyer Cian Ferriter produced a press release Ryanair had issued calling the minister ‘dozy Dempsey’ and ‘doolittle Dempsey’. This was two days after Dempsey had written a letter to O’Leary undertaking to set up the review panel.

  Ferriter put it to the witness. ‘There is a pattern of mislead. You misled the court, the Commission for Aviation Regulation, the minister, the public and [Ryanair’s] solicitors ... it shows a disregard for the truth.’ O’Leary rejected the multiple misleadings.

  Judge Kelly was more interested in how he had been misrepresented. O’Leary said he would apologise. ‘It’s not just enough that he apologises to the court,’ the judge replied.

  O’Leary’s lawyer took the hint. ‘Do you wish to apologise to the minister?’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  The judge was taking no chances. ‘Hadn’t he better write to the minister and tell him that I didn’t criticise him ... I want to see the letter before it is sent.’

  At the end of the proceedings, Judge Kelly told O’Leary he was lucky the matter wasn’t being treated as contempt. He put back the substantive issue, allowing the DAA and others time to apply to strike out the action on the basis of Ryanair’s conduct. He wants to see O’Leary’s letter of apology to Dempsey by Tuesday.

  Outside, Mickser was visibly shaken. He said he would write the letter of apology that evening. After a few questions, the reporters drifted off. ‘Is that it?’ he asked, looking like a man who badly needed a microphone to crank up his self-confidence and restart the spinning machine.

  He will be back in court on Tuesday with his draft letter for Dempsey. It might be fitting if he turns up in short trousers and school tie and cap. And he would be well advised to have everything in order. Any excuses about the horse eating his homework won’t wash with Peter Kelly.

  Meanwhile, if you happen to see Noel Dempsey this weekend, he will most likely have a smile on his face as wide as the Shannon, a spring in his step befitting a mountain goat. The smart money says he will get the letter framed and hang it in a choice position in his loo.

  Livingstone case shows An Garda Síochána at its best ... and at its worst

  In April 2008 James Livingstone settled a legal action against An Garda Síochána over the manner in which the force had dealt with him following the murder of his wife, Grace.

  13 April 2008

  The investigating gardaí knew who was responsible for the murder of Grace Livingstone. All they were missing was the evidence. Here is what happened, according to the deductions of the investigating gardaí.

  Grace was murdered by her husband James on 7 December 1992. He arrived home from work to The Moorings, Malahide, at around 5.50 p.m., a few minutes after dropping off a colleague. He and his wife had a row, probably because she didn’t have his dinner ready.

  They went upstairs to their bedroom, where James kept a number of firearms. He bound her hands, feet and mouth with adhesive tape.

  Then he shot her with a double-barrel shotgun.

  He placed the weapon in bushes outside the house. He ran over to a neighbour’s house, got no answer, went to another neighbour and ran back to his own house, whereupon he phoned the emergency services at 5.58 p.m. All of this occurred in the space of eight minutes, at the very most.

  There was no sign of a break-in. Nobody heard the shot. Nobody among the procession who entered the bedroom in the following minutes ... the neighbour, gardaí, the ambulance crew ... detected the smell of cordite. Livingstone’s clothes tested negative for gunshot residue.

  There was circumstantial evidence pointing towards a young man acting suspiciously in the area around 4.30 p.m. that day, when Livingstone was at work in the city centre. Some neighbours heard a loud bang around the same time. But the gardaí didn’t give that too much thought. They had their man.

  The husband did it, whatever about his lack of opportunity, not to mention motive.

  James Livingstone is, by his own account, a ‘hard man with a fondness for guns’.

  He had eight firearms on his property on the day in question. He was a long-time member of the FCA. He was employed in the special investigations unit of the Revenue Commissioners, a job that required a dogged and committed operator to do the State’s work.

  He is not a man given to public displays of emotion.

  His personality did him no favours in the weeks after his wife’s murder, but the gardaí are supposed to be concerned with evidence rather than impressions.

  On the night of the killing he gave a statement in which he listed his guns. They were taken away. He admitted that he may not have a licence for some of them.

  On 3 March 1993 he was arrested under the Offences Against The State Act, on suspicion of having an unlicensed firearm, which had been in possession of the gardaí since the previous December. The basis for the arrest allowed for his detention for up to forty-eight hours. He was kept in custody at Swords garda station for two days.

  He claims he wasn’t asked about the firearm during his detention, but repeatedly questioned about Grace’s demise. He says he was shown photographs of her naked body during this period.

  He was charged with possession of the unlicensed firearm. He pleaded guilty and was fined. A separate file on his wife’s murder was sent to the garda commissioner, but not the DPP. Livingstone was never arrested in connection with his wife’s death.

  In August 1993 Deputy Commissioner Tom O’Reilly asked Detective Superintendent Tom Connolly to review the file. Connolly is an oldschool cop ... understated, dogged and with a career of unblemished investigation behind him. He was joined on the case by Detective Sergeant Tom O’Loughlin.

  Soon after his appointment, Connolly met the leading officers on the case in Malahide.

  ‘I was left in no doubt that Jim Livingstone was the culprit for this murder and they just didn’t have sufficient evidence to charge him,’ Connolly remembers.

  He went in search of hard evidence. There was an issue over the time of death. A GP who attended
at 6.35 p.m. on the day said the victim had been dead for two hours.

  State Pathologist John Harbison was at the scene at 11.30 p.m. and he estimated the time to be around 6p.m.

  A reconstruction of the shooting was set up in the Livingstones’ bedroom. The shooter’s garments tested positive for gunshot residue.

  Another actor, who entered the room five minutes after the shot was fired, also tested positive.

  The neighbour who attended on the day of the murder, and the two officers who were first on the scene, entered the bedroom fifteen and twenty minutes after the discharge. The neighbour detected the smell of cordite in the bedroom.

  The two cops detected it on the landing outside before even entering the bedroom.

  The result raised a vital question: How could Livingstone have shot his wife – as the initial investigators believed – and no cordite be detected within minutes of the incident?

  The four neighbours who had heard a bang at 4.30 p.m. were also in situ that day.

  High winds meant they didn’t hear the shot during the reconstruction. A second reconstruction was set up on a day with similar weather conditions to 7 December 1992. Three of the neighbours heard it. The fourth was unavailable, but a garda taking her place also clearly heard the bang. The conclusion strengthened the proposition that Grace Livingstone might well have been shot at 4.30 p.m., while her husband was working in Dublin Castle, twelve miles away in the city.

  Gardaí in the original investigation had put the bang down to work being carried out by cable TV installers who were in the neighbouring Seapark estate that day. The workmen also attended one house in The Moorings, but the cops hadn’t even checked which house.

  There was evidence that pointed to another suspect, an unidentified long-haired man. Four sixteen-year-old girls had seen this man in the estate around 4.30 p.m.

  On the day in question, Philip McGibney was a landscape gardener working in the cul-de-sac where the Livingstones lived. He packed up around 4.30 p.m., got into his van, and turned the vehicle around outside the Livingstone home. As his van’s lights shone onto the Livingstone’s house, he noticed a young man with long hair straightening a plant inside the glass porch.