‘It was low-level continuous messing’
He also smeared a teabag on the wall, tore up pages of magazines intended for the doctor’s patients in the surgery, and on another occasion emptied the contents of a vacuum cleaner on the floor.
Dr Dolan told the MoS that for over a year and a half he endured meeting a ‘half-sneering’ smirking Callely on numerous occasions, but noted with a degree of pleasure that he wasn’t smirking in court.
‘It was a pretty miserable experience until I got video evidence and having got that, I felt vindicated,’ Dr Dolan said.
‘It would be like a neighbour complaining that another was emptying rubbish into their garden, you would struggle to believe them.
‘He is a cute and devious man who was relentless. It was low-level continuous, niggly messing,’ he said.
The property dispute with Dr Dolan arose as Callely is the primary tenant of the building, while Dr Dolan also has a sub-lease for his practice. The owner of the building died a number of years ago.
Garda Declan O’Carolan, of Clontarf Garda station, told the court Callely wants Dr Dolan to leave the building, while there are civil proceedings also in motion in relation to the building, with Callely taking action against Dr Dolan.
The MoS understands that the civil case relates to a dispute over electricity bills, as Callely reputedly became ‘enraged’ when he was released from Wheatfield Prison to find his electricity bills had increased and believes other tenants were on his circuit. A counter-claim will also be presented to the court. Callely, who now works as a used-car salesman and was a former Fianna Fáil junior minister, was previously sentenced in 2014 to five months in prison for fraudulently claiming €4,207 worth of mobile phone expenses during his time as a senator, after an exposé by the Irish Mail on Sunday.
Now, ‘financially broke’ and going through the difficulty of a marriage break-up, his defence had appealed for leniency and for the Probation Act to be applied.
However, Judge Kevin Staunton said ‘the difficulty is it’s not all about Mr Callely’.
In the witness stand, Dr Dolan said he travelled to work with ‘a sense of dread’ and continues to apologise to patients for the state of the building, which he described as ‘derelict’.