CHAPTER 18
The school was going well and I had good friends around me at long last, but I still had the anxiety of living in a house that I was finding impossible to sell. I needed to sell to pay off the mortgage, and the constant worry of it all must have got to me. On Christmas Day in 2002 I was with my good friend Eileen Murphy and I felt exhausted. I thought maybe it was the fumes from the car I was driving affecting me, because it was my first diesel. But Eileen could see that it had to be more than that. She was working in the Blackrock Clinic at the time and told me to go for a check-up immediately.
At the clinic I met the cardiologist, Peter Crean, who is an absolute darling. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked me, and I replied, ‘Tired, tired all the time.’ ‘Have you any pain?’ he asked. ‘No, but it feels like an elephant is sitting on my chest,’ I told him. He put me on the treadmill but not for long, because he could see that I was becoming breathless very quickly. He said that I would have to have an angiogram straight away. The angiogram revealed that I had coronary artery disease, and two stents were inserted. I was discharged and told to take an aspirin daily and take things easy. Now, taking things easy isn’t really me, and two days after leaving the hospital I was on a plane to attend a Historic Motorsports Show in Stoneleigh Park in England.
I enjoyed good health until three years later, when the same symptoms of tiredness returned, and I went to the clinic again. This time I was surely going to die, I thought. But no! The doctor inserted three more stents and I was alive and ready once again to try and sort out my ongoing financial problems.
Money was still tight; my mortgage still had to be paid, and with any start-up business there is little profit in the first few years. I couldn’t understand it when one day I got a letter from the Department of Social Welfare to say that they had decided I was no longer eligible and payment ceased. I tried to plead my case to the department and my local TD (Member of the Irish Parliament), but was told I was not entitled to receive any kind of benefit. They even asked me if I had any offshore accounts. Offshore accounts? If I had them, that’s exactly where I would have been, offshore!
As a last resort, I decided to ask Enda Kenny, who was the Taoiseach and leader of the Fine Gael Party in the Irish Parliament at the time, for his help. I had raced against Enda, along with Mike Murphy, a well-known Irish television personality, and Bishop Casey in a celebratory race in Mondello in the 1980s. I got on very well with him on that occasion, despite the fact that I won the race, so I decided to give it a go. I arranged to meet him in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin 2, which was just across the road from his office. I brought my bank statements and other relevant documents with me to substantiate my claim. Over a few drinks we had a great chat about old times, and I then proceeded to tell him all about my financial problems. He was most sympathetic and said he would see what he could do for me.
About three weeks later I got a letter in a white envelope with a gold harp on it from the Taoiseach’s office. I was excited, until I opened it. That letter said that the Taoiseach has ‘shown us your paperwork’ and ‘you are not entitled to anything’, because they considered I had too much money. Well, they didn’t say that exactly, but words to that effect. (I have friends who are married and very well off, who are getting pensions. I feel that it’s totally unfair because I represented Ireland all over the world, but that doesn’t count for anything.) All I wanted was to retain the social welfare money because, although I had started up the driving school, I still could not maintain my repayments of the mortgage without financial support. I had tried to explain that to Enda Kenny, but he and his department officials could not understand my predicament. I decided to take in a lodger, as my mother did long ago, and that eased the burden a little for the time being.
It was 2005 when Albert Gubay came into my life, or should I say I brought him into my life? I knew a bit about him – well, everyone did, he was famous. Gubay was a Welshman, an entrepreneur who made a huge fortune in supermarkets and real estate. He had made his name with Kwik Save Discount and went on to create supermarket businesses in New Zealand, Ireland and the US, and his current project was the Total Fitness chain of gyms. Gubay had bought the land behind my house and was going to build one of his gyms. I got in touch with him because I thought this might work in my favour: my house was so close to where the gym was to be, and maybe, just maybe, I could sell the property to him and this would be a way out of my debt to the building society. He agreed to meet me but specified it had to be at 8 a.m. the following morning as he was a very busy man. Eight o’clock in the morning is not the best time for me but you don’t quibble over the time of a meeting with a billionaire. I got up early and had the coffee ready to go. That was my first mistake: he drank tea.
I explained my situation to him and said that it might be mutually beneficial if he bought my house as it was adjacent to the Total Fitness gym he intended to build. He drank his tea and seemed as if he was giving it some thought. I asked him how he had got involved with fitness, seeing as supermarkets were his thing, and he told me it was a bout of back trouble in the early 1990s that prompted him to venture into the leisure centre and fitness business.
The initial meeting went well but he didn’t say yea or nay straight away. He invited me to dinner at Roly’s Bistro in Ballsbridge a while later to discuss the sale of the house. Everyone knew him there and made a great fuss of him, and of course they knew me too, but the staff were very discreet. He was charming, when he wanted to be, and insisted that I ate broccoli because I had told him about the clogged arteries and the stents and he said it would be good for me. I got to know him quite well, and like many successful men he liked to talk about himself.
Gubay was very fond of his mother and I think it was because of her that he gave a fortune to the Catholic Church. He told me that when he was young and poor he made a pact with God and promised if he became a millionaire he would give half of his wealth to the Church.
Mr Gubay was a hard businessman, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and, as I came to find out, was ruthless in his dealings. He called to the house for tea many times after that and invited me over to his house in Wilmslow, near Manchester, a beautiful place beside a golf course. After some months of pussyfooting around, he offered to give me €250,000 for the house and a further €25,000 if I would petition the neighbours so that he could get the necessary planning permission to build the fitness centre and, most importantly, he offered me an apartment on the complex to live in for life.
I was desperate to get the house sold before the building society repossessed it, but in truth it wasn’t the house he wanted but the two acres that surrounded it. So I trotted off each morning to talk to the neighbours and get their signatures on a petition saying that they had no objection to the Total Fitness Gym being built. I was pleased with myself as I managed to get the job done. I agreed to go along to the hearing with An Bord Pleanála, the national planning appeals board, and petition in hand to speak on behalf of the residents of the area. Gubay was there, of course, with his solicitors and colleagues, and I was surprised when, as I sat in the planning office, he didn’t so much as look at me. When they broke for lunch, I got up to follow them out, but he ignored me and I realised my usefulness to him was over. When the hearing was completed and planning permission was granted, he walked out and I made my own way home.
I had agreed to sell the house to Gubay and in return, when I left Four Winds, he was to provide me with a rent-free studio apartment for life in the Total Fitness Leisure Centre. The mortgage was paid off, the building of the Leisure Centre was nearly finished, and he said I could stay in the house as a caretaker until building was completed. For some reason he changed his mind, and out of the blue he gave me three weeks to get out of my house after living there for 30 years. I protested and he extended that to three months to allow me time to sort out the house full of furniture and an accumulation of memorabilia, as well as finding accommodation, until I moved into the Leisure Centre.
I couldn’t sell my furniture, although it was beautiful – the dining-room table was long, with 12 matching chairs; the sofas were huge and nowadays people in small houses don’t need that kind of stuff. I telephoned the St Vincent de Paul Society because I thought they might be able to dispose of it and make some money for the charity. They came and took it away, but I was most upset when a few weeks later I got a bill for €300 for the removal of my furniture.
In 2007 I moved in with a friend until the apartment was ready. The apartment! I went to view the so-called apartment with my friend Pat Doyle. It was number 116, I’ll never forget it. When we opened the door, we found it was just one room: 25 square metres, with not a cupboard in sight. It was positively claustrophobic. I couldn’t possibly move into that for even one day, never mind the rest of my life. Mr Gubay had to be joking. But he wasn’t! It transpired that the so-called apartment was part of a sports science complex, designed as a dormitory-type building where athletes could stay for short periods. It certainly wasn’t suitable for a 70-year-old woman with a houseful of possessions.
I went to my solicitor and started proceedings against Gubay immediately. It turned out that government regulations required ‘apartments’ to be at least 45 square metres and also the planning permission did not allow for permanent residential use. He had planned for international athletes to stay there and train in the gym for short periods, which was perfectly legal, but permanent accommodation was out of the question. Gubay had pulled a fast one on the wrong woman! I began proceedings and took him to the High Court, where I was granted damages. What with paying solicitors, storing what was left of my furniture and finding somewhere to live, the next few months were difficult, but at least the liability of the mortgage and the arrears was off my back.
After some months I eventually rented a house in Sandyford. When I moved, I thought I would never settle into the small house with its tiny garden, but now I wouldn’t leave it. I feel safe here and my neighbours are very good to me. I have a small circle of loyal and supportive friends and I am happy. Mind you, I often say it feels as if I lost 15 years of my life with all my troubles but that makes me only 65 now, so that’s OK. I enjoy living alone and being able to do my own thing whenever I want. I have my work at the driving school and I am always being asked to go here and there to motoring and other social events. When I am at home, I have the radio and television and I adore the soaps and the Discovery Channel. I was never a great reader because I get so easily distracted. I would like to have a dog or a cat, but I am away too often and it wouldn’t be fair. I once had a dog called Mossie, who would get into my suitcase and hide under the clothes whenever I was packing to go away.
I consider myself very fortunate. I am debt-free, not a rich woman, but a contented one. This thing of looking back and having regrets is not for me. You can look back on good things and be happy, but if they’re bad things, what is the point? Albert Gubay once said to me, never have regrets, there is nothing you can do about the past. That was the only thing he was right about as far as I am concerned.