MARTIN “THE VIPER” Foley, a veteran gangland criminal, took the first step in the High Court today in his bid to challenge the Criminal Assets Bureau’s bid to seize and sell his Dublin home.

Mr Justice David Nolan, refused to grant him an ex parte stay against CAB’s existing court authority to execute a repossession order on his house at Cashel Avenue, Kimmage, in a fortnight’s time.

The judge told Foley he would grant him leave to serve short notice on CAB of his intention to bring stay proceedings before the court next Tuesday. 

He would have to alert CAB of his intention, which would allow the bureau’s legal team to be present in court to meet his application.

Foley, representing himself in court today, told Judge Nolan he and his wife would be homeless if they were put on the street on 16 September. 

“My wife would be thrown out of the house,” he pleaded.

Judge Nolan told Foley, who was accompanied in court with his wife, that the Circuit Court had made a possession order against him in 2024 and he had already been granted an 18-month stay on execution of the order to allow him to find alternative accommodation.

Foley said that since then, new accounting information had come to light in his case and he wished to apply for a stay on execution of the possession order to allow him time to appeal the court existing court orders.

CAB had seized his home because he had failed to pay an outstanding tax bill of almost €1 million. The bureau had assessed Foley as owing more than €916,000 in unpaid taxes up to 2000.

The case has been going on for more than 10 years when judgment was recorded against the house, which is registered in the names of Foley and his deceased wife, Pauline, but his current wife, Sonya, is arguing that she owns at least half of it and it should not be sold. She claims she and her daughter will be made homeless.

The Foleys told the earlier court they are married and have a child together who was born in 2015, but the earlier court had been told they had not produced a marriage or a birth cert.

Foley claims he has made “several attempts to engage” but all have been rejected.

He claimed he works two days a week as a van driver but struggled to get by on his pension. He is 75, his wife is on disability, and he says they have no additional assets.

Foley said he is willing to engage in a Mortgage to Rent Scheme whereby CAB can sell the house, but he would live in it with his wife and child and make a monthly contribution through a payment plan.

He also offered to hand over to CAB “the benefit of two defamation actions” he is taking against the BBC and Penguin Book.

Foley also claimed he was led to believe that CAB and the Revenue Commissioners had agreed not to pursue him for the outstanding €1 million tax bill because he had made a deal with them.

However, the 75-year-old claimed he had been told if he did not pursue the Gilligan gunman, Charles Bowden, for €120,000, CAB would not pursue him for the tax debt.

Bowden, who is now in the witness protection programme, was responsible for the weapons used by John Gilligan’s drugs gang and had given evidence against Gilligan and Brian Meehan in the Special Criminal Court.

He also admitted in the Special Criminal Court that he loaded the gun used to shoot Martin Foley when he was shot and seriously injured outside his home.

Meehan is still serving a life sentence for the murder of Veronica Guerin.

Foley also claimed that he paid over €36,000 to the Revenue Commissioners 23 years ago, and that “a form of set off” should be allowed.

He said if he had received the €120,000 he was due when he won his case against Bowden, he would have given that to CAB and this would have gone “a long way”, with the additional contributions to pay off the original €178,000 debt.

He says he inherited the house from his mother, and it is not the proceeds of crime, but the Circuit Civil Court was told that is not an issue in this case, as this case relates to an outstanding tax bill.

His wife Sonya says that she is not liable in any way for the debt owed to CAB and pointed out that the house was her home and only property.

“There is no reality to me purchasing another home,” she says. “Eviction would make my daughter and I homeless.”

Barrister for CAB, Shaula Connaughton Deeny, said, however, that no explanation had been offered as to why Sonya Foley cannot work.

“She says she’s on disability, we’ve no evidence of that, their evidence is vague and bare at best,” Connaughton Deeny said.

“We have no evidence of bank accounts or other assets they may have, how they are all surviving without any income.

“There is nothing vouching anything they say before the court,” she said.

Foley has more than 60 previous convictions, including for assault, robbery and possession of weapons.

He was part of the criminal gang led by Martin Cahill who was known as the General and has survived several attempts on his life.

His barrister Keith Farry, who represented him in the Circuit Civil Court, said that Foley was led to believe this would not be pursued and now after all these years, it was “unfair and disproportionate” to do so.

He had remarried and the seizure of their home would have a detrimental effect on his current wife and child.