He's Got Friends In Low Places

Bertie Ahern could surely have organised a dig-out for Sean Dunne and Gayle Killilea.

Back in the rare oul’ times when the Republic was the apple of capitalism’s eye and they its deliciously golden couple, Sean and Gayle were among Bertie’s close bosom buddies. But now that they are down on their luck in far-off Connecticut, Bertie’s lip seems firmly buttoned.
He might have bunged them a few euro himself, having earned a medium-sized fortune since making a bee-line for the honey-pot within hours of leaving office.
Not a word of sympathy either from Charlie McCreevy, who delivered a speech at Sean and Gayle’s wedding on a yacht in the Mediterranean via speaker-phone from Mullingar or the Maldives, I forget which.
And what are we to make of the silence of rugby celebrity Ronan O’Gara and multi-million bonus-man “Fingers” Fingleton, boss of the bailed-out Nationwide Building Society, who caroused the endless nights at a bash that reminded nostalgics of the Aga Khan, Lana Turner and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo?
It seems just a wet week ago that Sean was the most dashing of Dublin’s property princes, king of the Boomtown Ratpack, raising the stakes higher than any rival gamester risked, eventually seeing them all off by going all-in with a €379m bet on the seven-acre Jury’s/Berkeley Court site, promising to “turn Ballsbridge into Knightsbridge”, innocently believing, it seems, that this would be an upgrade.
Where are the words of comfort from the Sunday Indo, in which gossip columnist Gayle once chronicled the couplings and cavorting of the new glitterati? Why not a word from the Sunday Times where one columnist had lashed out at the “old-fashioned snobbery” of stuck-in-the-mud residents unable to raise their sights to meet Sean’s soaring vision of a sumptuous complex with a 37-storey tower at its centre, in the shape of a diamond?
Sean had borrowed the dosh for his Dubai-style development from a basket-case of banks led by Bank of Scotland Ireland. Not that this caused any frisson of concern among the cognoscenti. No-worries was the watchword of the dickey-bowed devotees who near-enough raised the roof (some stood on chairs) as Sean strode to the podium at the Burlington to accept the accolade of “Property Personality of the Year” (sponsored by Bank of Scotland Ireland) at the 2005 Property Awards (sponsored by Independent Newspapers).
Sean and Gayle may have expected a Ballsbridge bonanza. Instead, property prices plummeted as precipitously as Fianna Fail poll ratings, plunging so deep in debt and doo-doo that many feared it would take a Chilean mine-style operation if he was ever to be extricated. So Gayle and himself headed out of town just ahead of the posse. Sean arrived in the New World with no uppers on his shoes or backside on his trousers or two cents to rub together in his badly-holed pockets.
Luckily, Gayle, to the stupefied amazement of all who knew her and NUJ rates, had amassed a few million which the emigrant pair hoped would win them permission to stay.
Now, as Mexicans assembled along the border in hopes of running the gauntlet of the local militia to smuggle themselves into the US will attest, winning residency rights in the land of free isn’t easy. Which is why Gayle and Sean rejected the option of swimming the Rio Grande in favour of putting $500,000 into a US business to qualify for an “investment visa”.
This is where we all came in. The lawyer Gayle had trusted with her hard-earned mazooma turned out – capitalism’s glory being its global reach – to be himself a victim of Tigerish ideology and the property crash. His home was in negative equity and his partner seriously ill: free health care being regarded as a manifestation of communist tyranny in the US circles in which Gayle and Sean hoped soon to move, her medical bills were zooming skywards, unlike a 37-storey tower-block at home in Ballsbridge. When Gayle went looking for her money back, the lawyer didn’t have it, any more than Sean had the dough which went AWOL in Ireland.
And there the morality tale rests for the moment, amid the echoing silence of the friends who had surrounded them in the days they sprinkled stardust on all who came close.
Regular readers will be aware that if there’s one thing this column cannot stand, it’s lousers who lap it up when others are down. But even so, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Returning from my sister’s birthday in refrigerated Winnipeg last week, I spent despairing hours running pell-mell and sweat-soaked from one terminal to another at chaotic, scary, unhygienic O’Hare airport, Chicago, in hopes of a flight to anywhere European, before rescue by Scandinavian Airways who bundled us last minute onto to a plane for Copenhagen even though we had no tickets – I see no reason to fly any other airline ever again – I slumped at last into a seat with James Ellroy’s masterpiece Blood’s A Rover and alighted on the opening of chapter 25: “O’Hare was bad. Big arrival numbers, big departure numbers, big get-into-town/get out of town volume. The terminals were refugee camps. The check-in lines and baggage lines were all-day propositions. Tantrums flared. Epithets flew. Little shoves snow-balled into fistfights...”
Spot on. Was it for this, I wondered, that Al Capone died?