My wife watched Lynn on the news from hospital bed ...then she died
FROM her hospital bed, Kathleen O’Mahony passed the remote control to her husband and through her oxygen mask asked him to put on the evening news. A report about Michael Lynn flashed on screen, with footage of the rogue developer and his wife, Bríd Murphy, leaving the High Court in Dublin.
It was Tuesday, October 16, 2007. Before the news was over, Kathleen would be dead.
‘I remember the evening quite well,’ Seán O’Mahony recalled this week.
‘My wife gave me the remote. She was above in Cork hospital. She was dying and she gave me the remote for the television and we turned on the Six O’Clock News and Kendar Properties came out on it.’
Kendar was Lynn’s global property firm, which had sold hundreds of offplan apartments in Bulgaria and elsewhere to Irish investors.
Among them was Kathleen, a Department of Justice employee who worked on the Garda payroll system, and Seán, a well-known Killarney publican.
‘I’ll think about it until the day I die,’ Seán said of the moment the story about Lynn came on the news, just before his wife breathed her last.
‘He appeared on television with his wife, she had long black hair. It was Kendar Properties and this Michael
Lynn. I never met him. I never knew him.’
But the name Kendar rang a bell and a horrific thought dawned on Seán.
‘I have an association with Kendar?’ he thought. ‘Have I? And my wife was dead before the news was over. She got a heart attack and they had told me they wouldn’t revive her if she got it.’
Kathleen O’Mahony was just 45 when she died, leaving Seán with two young daughters, then aged 10 and 13.
‘She got cancer after we had our second child,’ Seán explained.
‘But she got a reprieve until nine years later. And then it came back, and it came back in the lungs and whatnot.’
Kathleen’s cancer was the reason the O’Mahony family become involved with Michael Lynn in the first place, according to Seán. ‘In fairness to the Department of Justice, they knew our situation and they were very good. They knew she was terminally ill. She was off on sick leave, and they asked to know would she consider taking voluntary redundancy on illness grounds.
‘I think it was €45,000 we got in the voluntary package, and she got so much a week for the rest of her life.’
Kathleen knew exactly what she wanted to do with the money.
‘She said to me to invest this for the girls – that when they grew up, they could go to a holiday village and, you know, that she’d be thought of.
‘She wanted to leave an asset to the girls, and it would have been a lovely asset to leave them, and it was going to grow in value as well. It ticked all the boxes,’ Seán said.
Through a Kendar agent in the west of the country, the couple struck a deal and paid in advance for a unit at Kendar’s Bansko ski resort in Bulgaria.
‘We were aware the site was green at the time, but they were going to start [to build] immediately,’ Seán explained.
‘It was a good investment – if he [Lynn] was truthful. But unfortunately he wasn’t. I wonder does he know about me; do you think?
‘We paid money up front with it because we got away with a deal. We paid the money and basically, we thought no more about it.’
Two weeks after his wife died, Sean got a call from the agent to say there were problems. Angry and in grief, he went to the authorities to complain.
‘The following week I went into my local garda station, and I asked them to make sure that this man would be arrested immediately because he’s going to leave the country.’
Seán was right. On December 12, 2007, Michael Lynn fled Ireland. He owed €80 million to high street banks, much of it fraudulently secured via double mortgages.
Another €13 million was owed to private investors such as Seán, who had paid out for yet-to-be built apartments abroad.
As the scale of the scandal grew,
Seán’s garda complaint was joined by dozens more.
These files all wound up on the desk of Detective Inspector Paddy Linehan and his team in the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigations, now known as the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau.
Despite retiring last year, Mr Linehan stuck with the case and ultimately saw Lynn convicted this week of stealing almost €18 million from banks.
Detective Inspector Linehan’s team submitted as many as 30 investigation files to the DPP relating to private investors such as Seán.
No decision to prosecute ensued, but it was decided to charge Lynn with 33 counts of theft and fraud from banks.
‘They did everything in their power to help me,’ said Seán. ‘But the gardaí can only do so much. They were directed by top officials.’
The decision not to prosecute his case didn’t stop Seán.
‘I wrote to the President of Ireland – could he help me? I wrote to everyone and I’m so annoyed today that the DPP made a decision to protect the banks and not protect little people like me.
‘The question I’d like to ask is this; is he going to be sentenced for half a crime? Is he going to be sentenced for my crime as well? Am I entitled to chase him up or go to his house when he comes out of jail to look for my money back?’
In the meantime, Seán carries on running the family business in Killarney, the Faha Court Bar and Restaurant.
In 2019 he made national headlines for his Social Spin initiative, a charitable enterprise in which voluntary drivers use a community car to bring isolated dwellers to and from their local.
But it is his daughters of which Seán is most proud. One of his girls, a newly qualified solicitor, recently left for a new life in Australia.
His other daughter works as a housing officer with the Peter McVerry Trust and is studying to become a psychiatric counsellor. Whatever happens, they are the enduring legacy his wife left behind. And unlike foreign investments in brick and mortar, it is a legacy that can never be taken away from him.