Tenant owed €3,300 says he feels sorry for Jim Gavin

The former tenant who says he is owed money by Fianna Fáil presidential nominee Jim Gavin has said he feels sorry for his former landlord.

Niall Donald, deputy editor of the Sunday World, has spoken publicly for the first time about his claim that he is owed €3,300 by the former candidate, who ended his campaign over the controversy.

On the latest episode of the Crime Matters podcast, which he co-hosts, Mr Donald said he believed there could have been a “better outcome” if Mr Gavin’s handlers had taken a different approach to the issue.

“Does the punishment fit the crime? Probably not. I kind of feel sorry for him that he wasn’t handled better,” he said.

The journalist told how he mistakenly allowed direct debits to continue from his bank account to Mr Gavin’s bank account in the months after he ended his tenancy of a Dublin apartment in 2009.

Despite repeated requests to Mr Gavin for the repayment of €3,300 in overpaid rent, the debt remains outstanding.

In 2010, Mr Donald engaged a solicitor to write a letter to Mr Gavin demanding the return of the money and threatening legal action.

As he did not have Mr Gavin’s home address, he said he sent the letter to the apartment and to his then workplace: the Air Corps base in Baldonnel, Co Dublin.

He said he also delivered a copy in an envelope, marked private and confidential, to Mr Gavin’s parents at their home and asked them to pass it on to their son.

“I said: ‘I’m really sorry to call to your house. I’m a former tenant of Jim’s. I’m just looking to get a letter to him.’ They were really, really nice,” said Mr Donald.

However, some hours later, after midnight, he received a call from Mr Gavin, who, he said, was “really, really irate” about Mr Donald calling to his parents’ home.

“Ultimately, he calmed down,” the journalist said. “He accepted he owed me the money. He said: ‘I’m transferring it now.’”

But the money never arrived, Mr Donald told his podcast co-host, Nicola Tallant.

Legal proceedings were not taken because of the costs involved and eventually, Mr Donald said, he dropped the matter.

“I’ve been telling this story for years,” he said. What had happened to him had been hard to forget, he said.

"If you've ever been in those circumstances where you know, you feel that you've been ripped off, like it gives you this feeling of being powerless, and you know, I was really struggling financially. That's the truth of it."

"Every time Dublin won an All-Ireland or whatever, people would say, "Oh, there's your mate Jim Gavin."

He said he did not think it was a major story until Mr Gavin was selected by Fianna Fáil as the party’s candidate for the presidential election.

He then felt it was better not to publish it in the Sunday World because of his personal involvement with the matter.

The revelation about the overpaid rent was first reported last Saturday in the Irish Independent, a sister title of the Sunday World in the Mediahuis group.

On Wednesday, a solicitor acting for Mr Gavin told The Irish Times that, following the release of the podcast, he had contacted Mr Donald and explained to him he had been instructed to repay him the €3,300 “subject to clarifying two issues”.