THE FINAL REPORT of the Mahon Tribunal has disclosed that the FBI was involved in investigating Frank Dunlop’s diaries.

The report says that Dunlop’s credibility as a witness was called into question throughout his engagement with the Tribunal and that he was a “problematic witness” who had at times defied the Tribunal’s efforts to get to the bottom of political and planning corruption.

Questions arose over the quality of information provided by Dunlop in the form of his personal diaries, which he maintained himself.

“The redaction of some diary information (which ought not to have been redacted because it was related to Quarryvale), became evident to the Tribunal when, in 2001, in compliance with the Tribunal’s direction, Mr Dunlop provided his original diaries for the period 1990 to 1997,” the report says.

“When the original diaries were duly provided,” it continues, “it became apparent that a number of diary entries (or parts of diary entries) had been subjected to very heavy overwriting of a nature which indicated that a deliberate attempt had been made to alter them, obliterate them altogether and render them indecipherable.”

Upon discovering this, the Tribunal initially engaged a British company, before turning to the FBI for a forensic analysis of the diaries – with mixed results.

Both the Birmingham-based company and the FBI “successfully and conclusively identified information which Mr Dunlop had sought to conceal in a significant number of these diary entries, although both failed to yield definite results in relation to others.”

“The FBI declined payment for this service,” according to the Mahon report.

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