On the evening of September 17, after a beautiful sunny day, a half-naked, bloody man was found lying on the edge of a country road in Cornafean, a small market town in the north of Ireland. The man has a broken leg in two places, a bruised blue arm, slashed cheeks and is wearing only his underpants. On his chest, covered with blood, three letters were engraved with the cutter: QIH. Quinn Industrial Holdings, the company of which he is a director.
Kevin Lunney has just suffered two hours of torture. On his way home that evening, he found three men waiting for him in his garden, kidnapping him, and then beat him up in a shed, some 20 km away. The executioners passed a cutter blade under her nails, rubbed his wounds with bleach, broke his leg with a post … But most of all, they have a message. "They told me that I was there because of QIH, that I had to resign", tells the BBC, Mr. Lunney.
The incredible battle over this Irish company on the border with Northern Ireland reached a new stage in horror that day. Founded by Sean Quinn, a child of the country, who became a billionaire before losing everything in the financial crisis of 2008, this conglomerate of cement and building materials, which achieved a turnover of around 240 million euros in 2018 with an operating profit of 26 million euros, is at the heart of a dantesque struggle for control. A battle that recounts in focus the crazy years of the "Celtic tiger" and its collapse, but also the mafia drifts that reign on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, where the paramilitaries reigned supreme during decades.
Economic achievement
The small regional road which connects Derrylin, in the north, where the headquarters of QIH is located, and Ballyconnell, in the south, where several of the group's factories are installed, is barely ten kilometers away. Nothing marks the passage from one country to another, except a sign against Brexit. Everywhere, in this patch of equidistant countryside from Dublin and Belfast, factories are erected, while trucks run in all directions. Manufacture of glass, cement, tiles … The place has become an unlikely industrial area, despite its geographic isolation, providing thousands of jobs.
This economic feat is largely the work of Sean Quinn. Born in 1947, in the aftermath of the Second World War, this farmer son had the idea, in the 1970s, of extracting gravel from the family farm. An excellent businessman, he then diversified into cement, glass and even, later, insurance.
