€6m cost of comeback
BORIS Johnson will walk away from €6million a year if he becomes PM again, says his biographer Tom Bower.
He has lined up a series of US speeches for up to £250,000 (€287k) a time and signed a £1.5m (€1.7m) deal to write his memoirs, which will be put on hold if he returns to No10.
‘He was on track to earn £5 million this year but if he wins this vote, eventually the sky’s the limit,’ said Mr Bower.
A Netflix producer added: ‘If he returns to power, his value will only go up. Everyone loves a comeback story, especially American corporations.’
Mr Bower said he could easily match the £100 m (€114.6m) Tony Blair has made since quitting No10 in 2007.
the very start there were attempts to cover up the brutal killing of Fr Niall Molloy in Offaly in 1985. The priest’s remains were discovered at Kilcoursey House, in the bedroom of Richard and Therese Flynn with whom he had been friends for years.
The first the gardaí heard was when local parish priest Fr James Deignan knocked on the door of Sgt Kevin Forde’s home just after 3.15am on July 7, 1985.
He told the sergeant: ‘There’s a dead man at Kilcoursey. I don’t know who he is, he’s a priest. This is a terrible scandal in the parish.’
Then he asked (although later denied it): ‘Is there any way it could be kept quiet?’ Businessman Richard Flynn was tried for having beaten Fr Molloy to death but was acquitted of manslaughter. Flynn was believed to have resented the close friendship that had developed between Fr Molloy and his wife.
Over the years there have been criticisms of the way the trial was conducted and the remarks of the presiding Judge Frank Roe, who was at pains to say there was nothing improper in Fr Molloy’s relationship with Mrs Flynn.
A recent RTÉ Investigates found new evidence suggesting Flynn blamed Fr Molloy for wrecking his marriage, pointing to a clear motive for the killing.
This week it can also be revealed that a book on Fr Molloy’s killing, written by the late journalist Tom Reddy, was pulled by Independent Newspapers in 1988 hours before it was due to be launched.
The book, entitled The Death of Fr Molloy, never saw the light of day because senior executives intervened with publisher The Kerryman, which they owned. Kerryman management were left in no doubt that the book was not to be released.
All this occurred more than four years before the Bishop Eamon Casey scandal in which he was revealed as the father of a child in America. And it was years before the gardaí and Official Ireland had sufficient courage to confront rampant clerical sex abuse.
The unseen hand that suppressed Tom Reddy’s book acted in a manner that failed to reveal a motive. But it’s entirely implausible to believe it was done out of concern for defamation. More likely the motivation aligned to that of Fr Deignan – to prevent and dampen, as much as possible, any further public scrutiny.