Local priest contradicts Sean Quinn over ‘angry’ reprimand
THE parish priest of Ballyconnell sat in the living room of the parochial house in the Cavan border town yesterday choosing his words carefully.
Fr Oliver O’Reilly was the priest who delivered the searing homily blaming the savage abduction and attack on Kevin Lunney on a “Mafia-style group” with its own Godfather, a “paymaster or paymasters” so consumed with hatred they have lost their moral compass.
He was considering his response to former tycoon Sean Quinn’s first television interview since the attack on the businessman who once worked closely with the former tycoon.
Broadcast on Channel 4 last Friday night, Mr Quinn twirled his fingers and looked sombre as he took issue with the priest’s homily.
He said he called to Fr O’Reilly just the previous day. He was “very nice” to the priest, he said, but he told him “you’re wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong”.
This was not Fr O’Reilly’s recollection.
He said he was at home on Wednesday morning going through his papers when at 10.30am he opened the door to Mr Quinn.
He said Mr Quinn was “angry” and was “objecting to the tone of my homily”.
The priest said he told Mr Quinn that the person he referred to in the homily “could be anybody”.
“I am never going to identify that person, that’s not my role,” he said.
Mr Quinn told Channel 4 that he contacted gardai last Sunday. The following morning two gardai called to Fr O’Reilly’s house and requested a hard copy of his homily. The encounter reflects the toxic atmosphere that pervades the border communities since Mr Quinn lost his empire.
In 2014, the former management team of Mr Lunney, Liam McCaffrey and Dara O’Reilly, and a former local councillor and businessman, John McCartin, persuaded US investors to buy the manufacturing businesses. Mr Quinn was brought back as a consultant on a reputed €500,000 a year, in a move that was widely seen as his route back to owning the company. But the relationship did not work out. By 2016, he was gone.
Quinn Industrial Holdings has been plagued by criminal damage and arson attacks, its directors have been threatened and their cars have been set on fire in their driveways — all acts that have been condemned by Mr Quinn.
Although bad before, tensions have spiralled dramatically since the barbaric attack on Mr Lunney, a director of Quinn Industrial Holdings, who was abducted from outside his home in Co Fermanagh, and tortured. He was beaten, slashed in a horse box, doused in bleach and dumped on a Cavan roadside, with a warning that he and other directors would be killed if they did not resign from the businesses. Gardai are believed to have identified at least some of the gang responsible, some of them local to Cavan. The investigation is intensifying and detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigations are on the ground in Ballyconnell.
In his interview with Channel 4 News, Mr Quinn repeated his condemnation of the attack on Mr Lunney as “barbaric”.
“I’d have no hand, act or part or no knowledge or no gain; I’d have no benefit of doing anything to Kevin Lunney. Kevin Lunney and I were good friends for years.”
Someone with a high IQ would know that Mr Quinn was not a “real fool”, he said. And he would know that if something would have happened to Mr Lunney, that people would be looking in his direction. “Wouldn’t I know that? So, unless they consider me a real idiot, there’s no way that I could allow that to be done in my name.”
But, he said, the locals are angry about what happened to him: “Throwing me out the gate, giving me nothing, sacking me.”
The attack on Mr Lunney has ended any ambition he had of rejoining the company. “People can say whatever they want about me, but I don’t want to be seen as being a beneficiary of abuse or of criminal activity,” he said.
However internal records obtained by the Sunday Independent reveal the company’s difficulties with Mr Quinn.
An internal memo circulated by the US investors to senior management dated March 2016 stated that Mr Quinn was “increasingly uncomfortable” in his role as an adviser and wanted to acquire ownership.
Investors were “growing increasingly uncomfortable with the escalating acts of violence and intimidation”, the memo said.
It said an adviser to Mr Quinn had been told that he needed to rectify his relationship with management and take an active approach to the “increasingly negative activity” if he was to be “bankable”.
“The recent developments have done nothing but move Sean further away from his goal and, while obviously not positive for the business, are downright detrimental to Sean.”
A second document reveals that Mr Quinn appealed to the US investors to take him back as recently as five months ago. In a letter dated May 17 this year, Quinn acknowledged his behaviour: “On reflection, perhaps my passion for the business, and my enthusiasm to ensure that it was successful, meant that my views were not always articulated in the most appropriate manner.”
He claimed concern among staff and the community about the future of the company is “at an all-time high” and sought a meeting, and offered the investors his “expertise, goodwill and raw materials” to make the company successful again. It is understood QIH didn’t reply to the letter.
Mr Lunney’s brother, Tony, is one of five directors threatened in a separate anonymous letter with a “permanent solution” if they don’t leave the company. He told the Sunday Independent this weekend: “Sean Quinn excluded himself. It’s as simple as that. He had an opportunity to take part in the business and to eventually take control in some shape or form or his family in the future, and he didn’t take that opportunity.”
Meanwhile, the campaign of intimidation continues. The latest incident occurred last Thursday. A security guard contracted by the company had the words “keep away” daubed on the window of his car while parked at a local petrol station. Coming a week after Tony Lunney’s silage bales were slashed, it is the second incident to be reported to gardai since the attack on Kevin Lunney.