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The other Paddy Reilly
Read more about: Bertiegate, Corruption, Scandal, Tribunals
One of the mysteries of Bertie’s dig-outs is the way cash was mobilised from people of relatively modest means. Consider Paddy Reilly, not the Plasterer. A contributor to the Christmas legal expenses dig-out to the tune of £2,500. He had a butcher’s shop. He’s dead. So now is his wife, Ellen. Things were apparently sufficiently tight that when Bertie’s repayment cheque arrived, she said “‘thank God for Bertie now I can bury myself”. Bertie had not seen fit to mention the loan at Reilly’s funeral in 1996 or follow it up with his estate, a lapse that also features in his attitude to the Fintan Gunne loan. There is zero evidence for the Reilly loan, only his daughter making assumptions about how her parents would have dealt with it.
A man who would take a 2,500 quid loan from a man of relatively modest means at a time when he had 70 grand himself on deposit. That would have been about 4/5 times the average industrial wage at the time. With nothing put in writing about interest rates or repayment schedules.
With his liking for anoraks should we really be calling what Bertie activity at the time - Hoodie Robbing.
The whole dig-out saga sounds more and more like a classic, and well run, scam But then Ahern was taught his trade by a master con artist, aka the Boss!
Gordon