Billy Flynn was an Irish private investigator who came to national prominence during the Morris Tribunal inquiry into corruption in the Garda force in Donegal.
He took up the case in 1997, when Frank McBrearty from Raphoe claimed that he was being set up as a murder suspect and subjected to garda harassment. He bombarded the then Minister for Justice, Nora Owen, with over 100 files of documents outlining the McBreartys’ case.
When critics dismissed him and gardai privately said he was out to destabilise the force, Mr Flynn proved them all wrong. He produced evidence that threatening phone calls to members of the McBrearty family were made from the home of a garda. He was later praised for his work by the Morris Tribunal, the inquiry set up five years after Billy Flynn had started his investigations.
One unexpected visitor to his Enfield, Co Meath, home was the then Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, driving by in 2005 on his way to his holiday home. Mr McDowell had studied the letters that Mr Flynn had sent to Ms Owen. A few days later, Mr McDowell produced one of the letters on RTE’s ‘Questions And Answers’ to suggest that she had prior knowledge of garda corruption in Donegal.
Billy Flynn’s work had been limited to professional negligence cases when, in 1984, took on the case of Frank Kelly from Birmingham, who had invested life savings of £7,000 in a Dublin-based, Gibraltar registered company called International Investments. The money disappeared, and the investigation into the financier Finbarr Ross – a rogue investor who had left more than a thousand pensioners high and dry - which followed, led to Mr Flynn publishing ‘Gibgate – The Untold Story’ in 1992.
In the foreword, Mr Flynn wrote: “If I had known what I was taking on, I would have stuck to negligence cases. In the eight years since that phone call, my fight for justice for the victim …. has taken me all over the world. It has driven me to drink and a heart attack, caused me to neglect my family and bankrupted me twice.” He estimated it cost him £500,000.
Married with five daughters and three sons, he wrote that he was in the motor trade before starting his private investigator business. He described himself as a lifelong supporter of Fianna Fail at the time of writing, and stubborn by nature with a natural distrust of the establishment.
Billy Flynn ran several missing-person investigations and probed a number of unsolved murders. In later years, he worked as an insolvency practitioner.
Demand for his services soared in the worsening economic climate. He hoped for a final Big One to go out on and thought he had found it in sub-prime lenders. He knew many people who had borrowed excessively during the boom and were now left with mortgages they couldn’t repay for properties worth half the price.
Prior to his sudden death at his home in Enfield, Co Meath, on October 31, 2010, at the age of 64, he had been working on a campaign to legally challenge mortgage lenders trying to repossess homes. He believed that the information he had gathered in his investigations could be of help in future test cases against lenders.
Predeceased by his parents Patrick and Elizabeth, he is survived by his wife, Eileen; family, Patrick, Sharon, Eileen, Jackie, Peter, Elizabeth, Claire and Andrew, brother Patrick and 22 grandchildren.