Mick Clifford: Golfgate Four sing up a storm

Barman Anthony Curran told Galway District Court that he was on duty that night, covering for a colleague. He helped clear up after the dinner attended by 81 guests in one or two rooms and then he gave a hand in the residents' bar to which around 30 golfers had repaired.

The assembled guests were “drinking, chatting, singing,” according to Mr Curran. Pressed on the tenor of the after-dinner gathering in the bar, Mr Curran said there were “20 or 30 people, standing around chatting and drinking for a couple of hours and talking to each other. (They) just seemed to be having a laugh,” he said.

No harm in any of that, although when the event was subsequently reported on in the Irish Examiner, many felt that the luminaries had been having a laugh at the expense of the great unwashed, gathering together in a manner that was allegedly denied everybody else. That was, perhaps, unfair, but such was the alleged “hysteria”, as described by one of the lawyers in the case following the revelations.

Later, under cross-examination, Mr Curran accepted that there were 78 rooms in the hotel, leaving open the possibility that the singer was not a golfer.

“Not everybody in the bar may have been at the golf do,” lawyer Colm Smyth suggested to the witness. “From what I could see, everyone in the residents’ bar knew each other,” the witness replied.

Mr Curran was one of a range of serving and former employees in the Clifden-based hotel that gave evidence yesterday. They followed two senators and a Supreme Court judge into the witness box in this quite surreal criminal trial. 

The first was Jerry Buttimer, who resigned from his job as Leas Cathaoirleacht of the Seanad in the wake of the dinner. Like all the other witnesses, Mr Buttimer was highly complimentary of the measures taken by the hotel management in complying with Covid guidelines at the time. 

That, of course, is the matter at issue in the trial. Hoteliers John and James Sweeney and the golfing society’s president and captain, former senator Donie Cassidy and Independent TD Noel Grealish are charged with organising an event which contravened the guidelines under the Health Act. 

So far, all the witnesses for the prosecution have given evidence that would appear to dispute the basis for the prosecution’s case.

Mr Buttimer was followed into the box by a man who didn’t lose his job as a result of his attendance, but he had to sweat it out for a while as a controversy raged around him. Supreme Court judge Seamus Woulfe looked relaxed during his evidence now that the storm around his appointment has long passed. 

His account chimed with that of his fellow golfers, noting that everything looked compliant and well run and professional. He had been introduced to the society the previous year, when he was serving as Attorney General, by his friend, former senator Paul Coughlan. 

The night in question was the first dinner of its kind he had attended since the pandemic struck.

“I queried it with Paul about it being a group dinner and he said to me it was along the lines (of the restrictions) and that Donie had consulted with the authorities and everything was in order with the guidelines,” Mr Justice Woulfe told Judge Mary Fahy. 

As for the guidelines brought in by the government of which he was a member, he had a “hazy” knowledge.

He also added to the growing reputation of the Oireachtas golfing society, stating that he believes it was formed in the aftermath of the Arms crisis and led to the healing of divisions opened up during that existential threat to the State. 

On Thursday, the court had been told that the society was “important” as it made connections with English parliamentarians long before the Good Friday Agreement. If only we had known the unseen work that this august body had been doing in the name of democracy for all those years.