In the summer of 2003, I travelled down to the Rose Of Tralee Festival with the intention of writing a few thousand smart-arsed words about Ireland’s biggest and longest-running ‘lovely girls’ event. Unfortunately, it proved beyond satire. I never wrote the article, but it wasn’t an entirely wasted weekend.
There were all sorts of politicians and media types gathered in the town. Ryan Tubridy, who was MC-ing the competition, introduced me to the newly elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, Royston Brady. I must say that I found him to be a very likeable and straight-talking kind of character. The day we met he was all over the press following an admission that he’d visited lap dancing clubs whilst working in the USA. Far from being upset about it, he was obviously relishing the attention.
Over the course of a couple of drinks, I asked would he be interested in doing a hotpress interview. He readily agreed, and we swapped numbers.
For various reasons, the interview didn’t happen until late October. We met in the Mansion House, where he pulled me a perfect pint of Guinness from the bar, before we settled down to business.
The part that eventually caused him all the grief came in the first couple of minutes of conversation. As an ice-breaker, I’d asked Royston about his family background. He told me the following story about why his father had quit being a cab driver: “The night before the bombs went off in Talbot Street down here – 1974, it was – he was taken up the mountains at gunpoint, and they left him tied up there. He more or less had to beg for his life and explain to them that he had eight kids under the age of 11. But they took the car off him, tied him up and left him up the mountains.”
“Are you saying that your father’s car was used in the Dublin bombings?” I asked.
“His car was used as one of the getaway cars,” Royston replied.
The conversation moved on and, a little over an hour later, I left the Mansion House confident that the interview would be a headline–grabber. Not because of the story about his father’s taxi, though. Royston had called for the legalisation of cannabis, seriously criticised the Taoiseach’s brother, Noel Ahern, and had generally been as outspoken as I’d hoped.
Sadly, for all its controversial titbits, the interview went unnoticed. The day it hit the newsstands, Royston pulled off a publicity coup by allowing his official residence to be used for the wedding reception of a young homeless couple. The hotpress interview got lost in a sea of feelgood publicity.
It took a full eight months before it came back to bite him in the ass and totally scupper his political career. Royston was standing for a seat in the European elections, but when Joe Jackson resurrected the hotpress interview in the Sunday Independent, it caused him to seriously crash and burn at the 11th hour.
Apparently, the Barron Commission – who were investigating the Dublin bombings – had contacted him following his claims about his father’s abduction, and he’d failed to respond. His political opponents had sat on that damning information until the week prior to the elections, before leaking it to the media.
There was a furore. Although Royston insisted that his story was true, he offered no hard evidence to back it up. A retired Garda officer who was part of the team investigating the Dublin bombings also dismissed the taxi story. And Fianna Fáil remained curiously tight-lipped about it all.
Carnage! It was a week-long car crash in a getaway taxi nobody was sure had ever even existed. Royston was accused of being a barefaced liar in the national media. One satirical mag even Photo-shopped a Pinocchio-style nose onto his face.
He had been considered a sure thing in the elections, but his vote totally collapsed as a result of the controversy (and Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald unexpectedly won a European seat).
It wasn’t until weeks later that anybody bothered to check the records, and discovered that the front page of the Irish Times of May 17, 1974 – the day of the Dublin bombings – reported the hijacking of two taxis in the city the night before. One of them had belonged to Edward (Ray) Brady, Royston’s late father.
He might’ve been politically naïve, but at least he wasn’t a liar. Not that anybody ever apologised for calling him one.