The man who walked into a bar

The barman was Owen Smyth, at the time a Sinn Féin councillor in Monaghan town, and the Roundhouse, opposite the courthouse, was no normal bar.

Owen Smyth thinks Mr Hampton knew who he was, and cannot remember exactly when they first met, but drawing threads from different accounts, it seems likely that William Hampton knew someone else in Sinn Féin before his encounter with him.By his account, in dozens of visits over around two years, they developed a "good friendship over a lot of chat", discussing everything from World War I to Ho Chi Minh to the UK miners strike.

He said Willie Hampton first mentioned making a will and leaving all his money to Sinn Féin to his wife Anne, and said it several times before Smyth "took a punt" and introduced him to the solicitor who drafted it. Church Farm was over 110 acres and from there, he grew a vegetable and food supply business, EC Hampton Wholesale Ltd., with warehousing in Cambridge, on Newmarket Road.

His friend Rosalind Morton says he formed an early attachment to Ireland, from at least the early 1970s. "I repeat that after 15 years of English hate I have suffered for having the misfortune of inheriting a fortune, I am not used to the normality of life and people".When Ted died in 1984, he left William and Jacqui almost £1.4m between them, leaving his estate in trust for them with an accountant and solicitors.

The trustees, meanwhile, were focused on the development value of the estate, and through planning permissions, rental income and sales of parcels of land over two decades, they multiplied its worth. In William's letters, he thought he was due £7 million, but those claims appear alongside ridicule, and at times, a measure of paranoia, directed towards the trustees, Inland Revenue, and the government itself.

A month after his death, one of his Irish properties, in Durrus, Co Cork, was transferred to a neighbour. Sinn Féin sold the old shop in Wales to the National Trust there, for what it called "a modest amount". It also found Mr Hampton had a yacht, disused and rotting, in New Zealand. And it's going through probate for another £900,000 in a single bank account in Singapore.

Pity wouldn't do as much investigating in to our other party's in this country. Maybe there wouldn't be as much double jobbing and thieving from our T.D.s.

How did this warrant a Primetime investigation? This is why rte are struggling. Wasting money on non stories.

SF should have gave it to charity, we haven't forgotten the £26million bank job.

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