By: Michael O’Farrell
Investigations Editor
FIANNA FÁIL PRESIDENTIAL hopeful Seán Gallagher was centrally involved in a plan to raise millions for Fianna Fáil, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
In recent weeks, Mr Gallagher has been repeatedly questioned about his fundraising for Fianna Fáil and his past associations with the party.
‘I wasn’t an active fundraiser,’ Mr Gallagher told the Sunday Business Post. He said he only raised ‘small amounts of money’ for the party.
Later he quantified that figure during an interview with RTÉ’s Seán O’Rourke.
‘I am proud of my time with Fianna Fáil,’ he said, adding that he might have raised between €5,000 and €10,000 in total for the party.
However, the MoS can reveal that Mr Gallagher was once appointed by Fianna Fáil to oversee a fundraising plan that sought to erase the party’s £2.5m debt in the 1990s.
Answering to then Fianna Fáil treasurer Pádraig Flynn, Mr Gallagher was to oversee the implementation of the party’s discount card scheme.
Under the scheme, party members were to pay £20 a year in return for a card offering them discounts in participating retail outlets across the country.
The plan was to raise £600k in 1992, £800k in 1993 and £1m in 1994. At the launch, Mr Gallagher was pictured alongside then taoiseach Albert Reynolds.
However, despite Mr Gallagher’s appointment, the fundraising initiative did not take off and, according to his campaign spokesperson, the scheme was scrapped after the 1992 general election having failed to raise any money.
Nevertheless Mr Gallagher’s links with Fianna Fáil – which date back to the early 1980s – continued.
In advance of the 1992 election his was one of six names put forward to replace then tánaiste John Wilson, who had announced he would not be contesting a forthcoming election as Dáil candidate for Cavan-Monaghan.
Ultimately Mr Gallagher tactically withdrew from the contest. He later secured a job with the Louth County Enterprise Board and temporarily left active politics to focus on business. During this time his businesses received hundreds of thousands in State grants and, in 2006, thentaoiseach Bertie Ahern presided at the official opening of Mr Gallagher’s new company HQ.
But by 2007 he had rejoined the ranks of Fianna Fáil and once again became a member of the national executive – a position he first held in 1985, when he featured prominently each week in the Fianna Fáil community notes section of the Anglo Celt newspaper. Mr Gallagher’s links with Fianna Fáil came back to haunt him during his first presidential bid in 2011 when details of his involvement in a party fundraising dinner attended by a Republican convicted of fuel smuggling in 2008 emerged.
