It is a strange feeling watching somebody you knew very well and were quite friendly with fall into irreparable scandal that is entirely their own fault. That is the experience I’ve had this week watching Sean McKiernan who, as the country now knows, is the former Fine Gael Councillor jailed for two years and nine months for stealing €172,000 from a charity and spending the money on male sex workers and drugs.
“Friendly” is one of those words that denotes an inbetween. Sean and I were never “friends” in the sense of being confidantes or invited to each other’s homes or choosing to go out for a pint together. But we were “friendly” in the sense that we encountered each other quite regularly, texted back and forth, would have the occasional phone call, and generally kept in touch. I liked him. The easiest thing in the world to do in the present circumstances would be to pretend I did not like him, or to pretend that there was always a whiff of something unpleasant about him.
These would be lies. In the years before news of his appalling crimes broke, he was the kind of person you’d be glad to see at an event, because of the knowledge that he’d always be happy to talk and chat and introduce you to others. He was neither obviously duplicitous nor of obviously bad character. The worst you could say of him that he was a little pompous and self-important, but then those of us in glass houses are well advised not to fling rocks.
Indeed, I saw in him what I assume Navan Mental Health Housing Association saw in him when they made him their treasurer, chairman, and trustee. I assume this is what his fellow trustees saw in him when they agreed to sign blank cheques for him, on the understanding that he was simply saving them work and could be trusted with the money.
I am, by the way, astonished by the sums involved. Sean stole €172,000 over 13 months in 2019 and 2020, the vast majority of which went on sex and drugs. That’s €13,000 per month, on prostitutes and illegal substances. I never have, and never shall, engage the services of a sex worker, but I would imagine that spending that much in so short a timeframe would be a challenge, and is indicative of a descent into almost all-consuming addiction.
Nor can I imagine the frame of mind one must be in to think that so much money could be swiped, in so little time, without immediately raising red flags. Sean apparently believed he could get away with it. A psychological report prepared for the court said that he was prone to “false confidence”. The evidence in the case seems to suggest that Sean thought he could simply bluff his way out of it by pretending that he had disbursed the money to genuine charity cases he had encountered. Who, after all, would mistrust the word of the youngest ever Chairman of Cavan County Council?
I am astonished too at the sheer brazenness of his reaction to exposure and the way in which he seemed to treat it as no big deal: On his private facebook page a photo is still published of Sean, with ShannonSide Northern Sound Flagship Presenter Joe Finnegan, at Knock Airport in 2023.
Sean – who was a regular on the station – had been providing colour commentary across the day of Joe Biden’s visit to Mayo, pretending as if nothing had happened, when by that time he surely knew what was going to come out. Shannonside’s news report on his conviction on Monday was particularly scathing, and I can’t help wondering if that reflects some annoyance on their part that Sean kept on as if nothing had happened. It would be very understandable. In 2024, when the story broke and I wrote about it here, he texted me – our final communication – thanking me for my “very kind editorial approach (while not ignoring the issue)”. I remember thinking that there was something in his tone which was almost denial – as if this were just another political issue, or topical controversy, that would pass by without much notice.
Most of all I am just sad for the victims. I am sorry for the good and well-meaning people who set up a charity to aid the vulnerable and the needy, and believed that in Sean they had found a decent man and a kindred spirit who could be trusted to lead their organisation and utilise his wide array of connections to help their mission. And Sean’s connections went right to the very top: He was at Simon Harris’s wedding. He was on the Fine Gael National Executive for years. Everybody involved at even a middling level in that political party, from county councillor to senior Minister, knew who he was and knew him well. Before these events, I had never heard a Fine Gaeler speak ill of him, beyond occasional gossipy but not necessarily mean-spirited barbs about his bachelor status and slightly camp affectations. Some nicknamed him “Uncle Monty” after the character in the 1987 movie “Withnail and I” for the similarity of their mannerisms. But that was more in affection than out of cruelty.
We cannot make windows into men’s souls. What was going on in Sean’s head while he committed these crimes shall only ever be known to him. What I do know is that the prison sentence he has now commenced is and will be for him the least of his punishments. Gone forever is the lifestyle and status and connections and and media appearances public acknowledgments that he loved having. No senior politician will ever wish to be seen in his company again. No employer will ever risk hiring him again. No media outlet will ever cite him as a source again, and in his native Cavan he shall never again be the hale fellow, well met. He will forever, and rightly, be a social pariah. That, more than prison, is his true punishment.
And yet on a personal level I feel sympathy for him. No human being is ever the sum of their very worst moments. I know, because I experienced it, that he is capable of kindness and goodness, alongside the immense harm he has caused to a charity, which has now had to shutter its doors.
Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar that “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”. In its own small way, the McKiernan affair is a Shakespearean tragedy of a sort. He was capable of doing much good in his life but shall be known and remembered now for the rest of his days as the perpetrator of a monstrous wrong.
Sean will not find prison easy, and nor should he because it is not supposed to be easy. He deserves every night he will spend behind bars. He has paid for his new lodgings with other people’s money.
But I retain the hope, as someone who could never say anything other than that I once liked him and was friendly with him, that there’s some other productive and useful life for him on the other side of this mess, even if that is not in Ireland.