He’s been through the wringer but can Flynn come out clean?

Now Flynn has to talk himself out of another tight corner. A company of which he is a non-executive director is at the centre of a garda investigation into IRA money laundering. Two other directors have been arrested and questioned.

No evidence has yet been produced that Chesterton Finance was directly involved in nefarious activities, but after his home and offices were raided by the Criminal Assets Bureau on Thursday, and after he himself was questioned by gardai, Flynn had no choice but to resign as Irish chairman of Bank of Scotland, from the board of the VHI, and as the government’s troubleshooter on decentralisation.

Flynn may of course be an innocent dupe in the whole affair, or he may be part of a money-laundering plot and lying. His performance on RTE News on Friday night, in which he promised to run naked up and down the street if he was proved guilty, was convincing. The fact that gardai have not arrested him as part of their nationwide swoops indicates that they don’t believe he has a direct case to answer.

But what was a banker of Flynn’s pre-eminence, never mind a republican of his left-wing bent, doing mixed up with a money-lending operation in Cork? When the company, which provides loans at exorbitant rates to people who have usually been turned down by mainstream financial institutions, was investigated by The Sunday Times in 2003, Irene Johnstone, a director, said everything was above board. She insisted that the company was not trading in human misery. “We look very carefully at the borrower’s exit mechanism and turn down loans if people don’t have an obvious way of repaying it,” she said.

Flynn became a director last year in return for a 10% stake, and brought in his brother James as a financial broker. James Flynn’s property in Louth was raided by gardai last week. “I’m absolutely satisfied that Chesterton is okay,” said Phil Flynn. “There’s no-one saying yet that there’s anything wrong with Chesterton.”

The surprise is that Flynn didn’t see any of this coming. By his own admission, he had someone check out Chesterton before he joined. He was “quite satisfied” with what he found.

Flynn is used to checking companies out. In the past five years, he has become a corporate and government fixer called in to sort out all sorts of problems in boardrooms and public offices. He investigated the post office network, a baggage handlers’ dispute at Dublin airport, sorted out a planned merger between two state banks, and was asked by AIB to select employees for an early retirement scheme.

Born in 1940 in Dundalk, his father was a carpenter who suffered a serious workplace injury when Flynn was five. He won a case for compensation, and then contracted tuberculosis and lost his disability pay. The trade union didn’t support him, saying he was out of benefit, but Flynn’s father raised money for a court case and won it back. When Phil Flynn turned 14, he was deemed old enough to go to work, and his father lost his allowance again.

All of this steered Flynn towards Sinn Fein. “I was angry, crying out for an answer to the whole inequality of the system,” he has said.

He recalls being at a 1950s Sinn Fein meeting and thinking “here are guys who don’t stand to gain a penny from this. All they’re going to get out of it is hardship, harassment, imprisonment”.

Flynn was soon to get a taste of all this himself. By his own admission he assisted with the IRA’s border campaign in the late 1950s, and “saw the inside of a garda barracks more than once”.

In 1974 he was acquitted in Dublin’s Special Criminal Court of being a member of the Provisional IRA. Three years later he was detained and questioned by police in Liverpool under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. This may have been because of the attention he attracted when, as a trade union official, he acted as a go-between during the kidnapping of Tiede Herrema, a Dutch industrialist captured by two breakaway members of the IRA.

In April 1981, he gave the address at the Easter commemmoration in Belfast’s Milltown cemetry. “Today’s Troubles will look like a Buckingham Palace garden party compared to what will happen if Bobby Sands dies on hunger strike,” he warned.

Flynn became general secretary of the Local Government and Public Services Union in 1983, much to the displeasure of many of its members who resented that he was also vice-president of Sinn Fein. Government ministers refused to meet union delegations if Flynn was present.

Flynn unreservedly condemned the Harrods bombing in December 1983, and insisted that he was keeping his political and trade union activities separate. But soon afterwards he stepped down from his position with Sinn Fein.

He reached the top of the trade union tree, and then the IRA ceasefire in 1994 wiped the political slate clean for Flynn. In 1996 the Fine Gael/Labour coalition — the same combination of parties that wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole in the 1980s — appointed Flynn as chairman of a state bank.

Bertie Ahern’s administration has been even more willing to use Flynn’s undoubted skills as a negotiator and fixer to sort out a range of political problems.

The question remains whether Flynn has been offering these skills to republicans also. “If you were a Provo and had 30 million in your back pocket he would be the sort of person you’d think about approaching,” said one Sinn Fein member.

Flynn denies any wrongdoing and says he will be back. The skilled negotiator has talked his way out of trouble for now, but the Irish government and captains of industry may decide that it’s time once again to leave some distance between themselves and this self- confessed “unrepentant republican”.