'The man who brought Charlie Haughey down was Charlie Haughey, not me.'

Noel Smyth interviewed by Ursula Halligan

Q) What motivates you?

A) I suppose the will to succeed. I would have come from a situation where I did my Leaving Certificate in 1969 and I got one honour in geography. I was 17 and didn't have the opportunity or the ability to go to University. So, I had to make up my mind. Was I going to work and try and get into the Incorporated Law Society - law school – with a preliminary exam. I worked very hard for six weeks and I succeeded.

Then, when I got into UCD as a result of the Law Society exam, I found that I really enjoyed law and I found that when I worked at it, I succeeded and I suppose that gave me an ethos that, when you work hard at something, you got results. As a 17 year old I was a terrible messer - before my English Leaving Certificate exam I was at a party the night before - and I certainly didn't put the time and energy into studying that I should have done, had I been expecting to get results. When a teacher would ask who was going to university I would put up my hand and they'd say, ‘Smyth, put down your hand, you're only messing'. I might have been 17 but I was probably very immature.

Looking back do you see this as a need to prove yourself?

Oh very much so. I think that there was nobody more surprised that I was actually going to go to university than my parents. I had worked from the time I was 14 as a boy porter in CIE and my father said, ‘you're going to end up as a porter for the rest of your life.' And I said, ‘No actually, I've got my exam and I'm going into UCD but I need £200 to become apprenticed.' I said I had the money to go to the Law Society but I hadn't got the money for the apprenticeship. My father was a golf professional and if you take it, at that time, that a golf lesson was 10 bob for a half an hour, he had to give 400 lessons for me to become apprenticed. I think that if I had to think of something that would have driven me harder than anything else (to succeed) it was probably that £200.

Are you as religious as has been reported? [Newspaper articles describe  Mr Smyth as a daily communicant].

I think religious is a very bad word for anyone to use. I have a deep faith, which I think I probably rely on a lot more than people realise. What I do is - for Lent I certainly try to go to Mass every day. I haven't succeeded this Lent for the simple reason I was away last week and I got to Mass one day. But I think, again, during the year if I didn't get to Mass every day I'd certainly get to Mass probably 3 to 4 times a week but that's because I would want to go and not because I feel the need to go.

Do you ever feel a conflict between your Christian principles and your practice as a businessman and lawyer?

I do. It's been said that I go to Lough Derg (every year) and, yes, I find it a fantastic place to reflect – I think that the whole idea of the penance, of what they call doing penance, I mean, it's boring. You say the same prayers, the same procedures, but in itself it is a very fulfilling position because, again, everybody who's there is in exactly the same position. They're without food, without sleep and no shoes.

How do you like being described as the man who brought down Charlie Haughey?

I think it's probably unfair because I think the man who brought Charlie Haughey down was Charlie Haughey and not me.

But you played a big role in it.

I think the answer is that I would take my position as being a lawyer. I would take anything connected with the law as being absolutely sacrosanct in my mind. I was obliged as far as I was concerned, under the Tribunals Act, to give evidence. I tried very hard before I gave any evidence to persuade Mr Haughey to take certain steps. I refused to give any evidence to the tribunal until such time as I was ordered to do so and I would not have been instrumental in any position that Ben Dunne would have taken. But, if
Ben Dunne did ask me what his best move might be, as far as Charlie Haughey was concerned, and, when he suggested he was going to give Charlie a million pounds, I was the communicator of that information to Mr Haughey and I would have been a persuader to Mr Haughey to take that. So, bringing Mr Haughey down, I feel, is a matter which, again as I said any action that I took, I took as I see it within the confines of being a solicitor. I didn't do it as Noel Smyth, as having any agenda for anybody. If that's what the footnote to history is, that I brought Charlie Haughey down, so be it – I won't be worrying about it.

On a personal level do you feel sorry for him?

Of course I feel sorry because I think if you look at the people who've done probably the most in this country in the last 20 years – I would put them as Charlie Haughey, Dermot Desmond and Tony Ryan. And I think they've done so in terms of, if you look at the financial services centre, the absolute success that's been. If you look at the cheap air fares that have come into Ireland and if you look at the foresight that these three men individually, and collectively, have put into the country, it is unstinting in terms of the actual effort and energies and loss of personal opportunities that they would have got themselves. In Charlie Haughey's case, I feel that if he had taken a different course of action – had he put more faith in the fact that Irish people of their very nature are unbelievably forgiving, had he had enough confidence in the ability that he displayed for more than 25 years as a very experienced politician – if he'd put all that experience on the line, then you would not be asking me this question now.

How embarrassing is it for you that you had to settle a tax bill of £500,000 with the Revenue Commissioners?

It's always embarrassing when you have to pay money to the Revenue Commissioners and the actual amount involved was more than £500,000.

How much was it?

It's not relevant, but it's more than £500,000 and it happened because of circumstances whereby I changed from being a sole practitioner and had moved into a partnership and it was purely and simply a situation whereby the Revenue Commissioners commenced an audit. I went through the machinations of obviously getting in advisors and auditors and fortunately, before we were in a position to sit down with the Revenue Commissioners, we discovered it ourselves and we made a voluntary disclosure immediately to them and told them how it occurred.

They accepted it and continued with their audit. The audit lasted for a period over a three year period and involved all my companies, me personally, my practice as a sole practitioner and Noel Smyth & Partners. So, it's embarrassing but I mean you can not be in business for about, I suppose, 25 years and get everything right – you're going to get something wrong. I certainly would have preferred it not to have happened and loved to have been able to be sitting here today and put up my hands and be able to say
‘Yes, everything I do is correct – that everything is great'. But it's not. I make mistakes and fortunately for me they don't necessarily always get into newsprint.

The tax settlement referred to a £7m payment by Ben Dunne in December 1994 but it was accounted as falling into the tax year 1993/1994.

No, that's not correct.

What's the position then?

I've just told you I made a tax return and – as part of that tax return - I was required by the Revenue Commissioners to indicate what our work in progress would have been at any particular time. There are accounting procedures. Those accounting procedures were followed and followed to the letter. The Revenue Commissioners asked us for a submission to them. So there is no issue at all as far as the incorrect amount that you've said. There was no £7m involved  but the incorrect amount that you've said that Ben
Dunne gave my firm in terms of the cost of doing the case were fully accepted. [Magill is aware that Mr. Smyth is correct in denying that the fees were £7 million – the fees were appreciably higher than that figure] That was never an issue. The issue, in relation to the payment of tax that I made to the Revenue, was nothing to do with Ronan Hannigan or Colman Birmingham [Smyth's partners]. It was a glitch - it was a mistake, it was a boo boo that I made and it happened because, as I said, I stopped being a sole practitioner and moved into a partnership and didn't take into account a transaction which effectively, I assumed, was in the partnership but should have been in my sole trade.