BUSINESSMAN DENIS O’BRIEN has claimed Justice Moriarty suffered from Stockholm syndrome in identifying with certain people in his Tribunal judgment – particularly prosecutor Jerry Healy.
Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe how kidnapping victims can identify sympathetically with their kidnappers.
Published earlier this week, the Moriarty Tribunal’s report criticised TD Michael Lowry’s role in the awarding of a mobile phone licence to O’Brien’s Esat Digifone in 1996 and said O’Brien had made payments to Lowry.
“It’s all hearsay, it’s gossip, innuendo,” he said of the report.
In an interview with RTÉ’s Pat Kenny this morning, O’Brien claimed that Justice Moriarty wasn’t “up to the job” and that he hadn’t written the whole report; instead, he suggested that Jerry Healey SC contributed largely to the publication.
“If you look stylistically at the report and the language, it’s not a judge’s language,” he claimed.
O’Brien criticised Healy’s presence as the lead prosecutor in the Tribunal proceedings, saying he earned €10m from his work, and suggested Healy had seemed biased against Esat Digifone from the beginning of proceedings.
He said he’s not concerned that the report is being sent to the DPP as the DPP will make up their own mind about its findings.
O’Brien suggested people read John Water’s piece on the Tribunal in today’s Irish Times because “he got it in one”. Water’s piece, called 2,349, 14 years and a whole lot of idle gossip, says that the “Moriarty verdict is less a judgment and more like the opening statement in the court of public opinion, a hearing that will continue for some time”.
The Tribunal may seek to recoup some of its multi-million costs by pursuing Lowry and O’Brien.
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