Heavyweights limber up for €1 billion Quinn Insurance versus PwC bout

Negligence case could run until 2017

Former Attorney General Paul Gallagher: probably the Gustav of the Irish legal fraternity. 

The biggest battles require the biggest guns. And so it was this week for the preliminary salvos of the €1 billion negligence case taken by the administrators of Quinn Insurance against its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Some of the most expensive legal talent in the State was in action in courtroom number seven for a three-day hearing on a brain-frazzling pre-discovery motion.

Paul Gallagher, who was attorney general under Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen, is probably the Gustav of the Irish legal fraternity.

He togged out for Michael McAteer and Paul McCann, the Grant Thornton administrators to Quinn, which has launched one of the biggest legal claims in the history of the State against PwC for alleged negligence in auditing its books.

But for every Gustav mega-gun, there’s a Monster Mortar. PwC’s legal team was captained by another former attorney general, Dermot Gleeson, the one-time AIB chairman who served John Bruton’s rainbow coalition.

That the opposing legal heavyweights served as AG under different regimes of the two Civil War parties pales beside their starkest contrasts: Castleknock alumnus Gallagher hails from Kerry, while Blackrock College kid Gleeson comes from Cork. I wonder have they a shneaky tenner on the case?

Warring clients aside, the two men are reportedly quite good friends. That didn’t stop Gallagher on Wednesday having a little dig at his counterpart’s “rhetorical flourishes” in front of Ms Justice Caroline Costello.

Gleeson, to his credit, smiled and rubbed his shaven head. Gallagher stroked his beard. Yet another difference between them.

Riding in Gallagher’s sidecar on the Quinn case is fellow senior counsel, Michael Collins.

Gleeson was accompanied on the top bench by Paul Sreenan, who also recently faced off against Gallagher in a case over Garda whistleblowing.

A battalion of junior counsel and solicitors were in court to support the main barristers. With the possible exception of the stenographer, and some bloke who was asleep on the bench down the back, I was the only person in the packed courtroom without a law degree.

The entire case could run until 2017. The loser is in for a whopper of a bill.