Belfast businessman Kirk McCambley is away on holidays and his staff don't know when he will be back !
How Kirk shot to fame:
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Iris Robinson and Kirk McCambley: a strange tale of Belfast's 'odd couple'
Mother-son relationship turned into love affair and dubious financial dealings
Esther Addley
guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 January 2010 22.10 GMT
Kirk McCambley: 'I always seen her coming in and out. Just knew her from an early age, through the butcher’s and through my dad.' Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP
In what has developed into a stranger-than-fiction tale that has convulsed Northern Ireland, one of the more remarkable details of the affair and financial dealings between Iris Robinson and Kirk McCambley is how they met.
Mrs Robinson — MP for Strangford, member of the Northern Ireland assembly, alderman of Castlereagh borough council and wife of Northern Ireland's first minister — was a frequent customer of William (Billy) McCambley's butcher's shop in Ballyhackamore, east Belfast. His young son Kirk would help out in the shop, and first got to know her in the late 1990s when he was still at primary school.
Kirk McCambley, now 21, told BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme on Thursday night: "I always seen [sic] her coming in and out. Just knew her from an early age, through the butcher's and through my dad."
He could not have failed to have known, even at that early age, who she was. With Peter Robinson's ascension in 2008 to first minister, the couple have officially become the "first couple" of Ulster politics, but have held that role for decades in loyalist east Belfast, where he has been MP since 1979 and a leisure centre is named after him.
Though the DUP leader has a buttoned-up public image, his wife has always been a more colourful figure, exuberant in her manner and carefully coiffed and heavily made up.
But no one can have anticipated that this decidedly odd couple – the devout Mrs Robinson, at 59, was old enough to be the then 19-year-old McCambley's grandmother – would have an affair .
The relationship developed after Billy McCambley died in early 2008 and Iris promised to look after his only son. "She made sure I was OK," Kirk McCambley told the programme. "Obviously anyone who has ever lost a parent knows that it's an incredibly hard time, and she was there to help."
Selwyn Black, Mrs Robinson's former political adviser who turned whistleblower for the BBC exposé, told the programme the couple would take evening walks around Belfast, with Mrs Robinson at first taking a maternal, advisory role. "As for Kirk he is the other son I would have loved to have been a mother to," she texted Black — the Robinsons have two grown up sons and a daughter.
But it was not to remain a mother-son relationship; by mid-summer 2008 the couple were having an affair.
It is difficult to overstate the shock Mrs Robinson's admission on Tuesday provoked in Northern Ireland. Both Peter and Iris Robinson are vocal evangelical Christians from a deeply religious and conservative unionist culture.
Mrs Robinson's transgression was the more astonishing given the controversy generated last year when she described homosexuality as an abomination on a par with paedophilia that made her nauseous. As the BBC programme coyly noted, the passage in Leviticus that she quoted contains similar sentiments about adultery.
Her Christian faith, however, does not seem to have hindered the relationship – nor set limits on her actions as a result of it. Shortly after the couple started sleeping together Mrs Robinson took her young lover on a walk along the river Lagan in Belfast and showed him a new cafe development for which Castlereagh council was advertising for tenants.
She told him, said McCambley, "she had … heard about a place down there. I came down and [saw] it, loved it, and started working on my business plan."
But at just 19, with very little business experience and almost no money, McCambley needed help. McCambley says he had heard of the two well-known property developers who each gave Iris Robinson £25,000 which she passed on to him, but had never met them. (It is not known on what terms the men gave the money to the politician, though questions will certainly be asked about the fact that Mrs Robinson, around the same time, was lobbying on one of the men's behalf over a prospective development.)
There was one more thing – McCambley was to give her a £5,000 kickback in cash so that she could pay off her own debts. He did.
When the question of the lease came to be decided at a council meeting, McCambley was judged the only candidate to have met the criteria. Mrs Robinson was present but did not declare her financial or personal interest.
By the end of 2008 the relationship was over. "Just cut links with Kirk. God's word was very clear on it. He was reasonably OK on it. I am not," she texted to Black. But despite her belated invocation of God, the real reason seems to have been money – Mrs Robinson wanted the investment back. "It seems cruel but I am not going to soften until he has paid back the 45k and he has got until Christmas," read another text.
The money was not, at that point, to be returned to the developers, but £20,000 was to be paid to Mrs Robinson's pentecostal church, the Light 'n' Life Free Methodist Tabernacle in Dundonald, on the outskirts of Belfast, and another £20,000 to repay her debts. Black, himself a former chaplain who was increasingly unhappy with the arrangement, texted his employer: "Where is God in all of this?"
That Christmas, at their Florida second home, Mr Robinson found out about the financial arrangement. At his urging, according to Black, McCambley was told to send the two payments of £20,000 (it is unclear what became of the last £5,000) to the two developers.
Two months later a Robinson family member, according to Black, found a letter in which details of the relationship emerged. On the night of 1 March 2009 Mrs Robinson tried to take her life.
Selwyn Black was summoned to the family home the next morning, where he found her "seriously ill" and called a doctor, who rang for an ambulance. Mr Robinson had left for work; television footage showed him joking in the assembly chamber at the time his wife was being taken to hospital.
In her statement, Mrs Robinson said her affair – "the worst thing I have ever done" – was explained by an ongoing battle with depression. "I grieve that I have damaged my profession in Christ, but I am comforted that He was able to forgive even me," she said. Peter Robinson said he had considered leaving his wife but she "would certainly have been less likely to recover if I had left".
He has forgiven her; whether the electorate can forgive them both is yet to be seen.
guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 January 2010 22.10 GMT
