Michael O’Farrell
Investigations Editor – Irish Mail on Sunday
FOR sure, Cyril McGuinness was crazy enough to think he could get away with orchestrating the brutal abduction and torture of QIH director Kevin Lunney.
There are dozens of law enforcement officers, judges and prison guards from Dublin to Enniskillen – and further afield in Europe – who have all incurred his wrath. There are also perhaps hundreds of victims in several countries who have been affected by his thefts and violent crimes.
Originally from the Rush area of Co. Dublin, McGuinness was born on August 27, 1965. By 1986 – at the age of 21 – his true colours had already been firmly established and the authorities in Dublin paid particular focus to his activities.
He returned the favour in his own unique way. In August 1986 – having already notched up 10 convictions – McGuinness appeared before Swords District Court Judge Seán Delap, for sentencing on a charge of assaulting three gardaÃ.
After an earlier hearing in the same case, at Balbriggan courthouse, McGuinness had given the judge the fingers.
He wasn’t finished there. When Judge Delap handed down a fine of £2 for breach of the peace at the Swords hearing, McGuinness had a prompt reposte…
‘You’re only a bo*****s,’ he told the Judge who then queried whether McGuinness felt there was any reason he should not be imprisoned for contempt of court.
‘F*** off,’ McGuinness replied.
Judge Delap – known for his frankness in court – then jailed McGuinness for seven days and made a salient prediction.
He called McGuinness ‘quite mad’ saying he intended to do all in his legal power ‘to prevent him from killing someone’.
Judge Delap added that he was convinced McGuinness would ‘kill a member of the public or a member of the gardaÃ.’
His alleged involvement with the IRA in London in the 1990s, and his key role in the ceasefire-ending Canary Wharf bombing in 1996, is likely to have proven the judge correct.
In any case, the stage had been set for a remarkable criminal career that would span more than three decades.
All the while McGuinness would repeatedly taunt the authorities with trails of false and constantly changing addresses and aliases throughout Europe.
Playing the advantages of the border area between Cavan and Fermanagh was a speciality he excelled in with apparent glee.
Officially, his name was David Philip Cyril Anthony Kevin McGuinness. But, as identified in court, he also used up to a dozen different aliases at different times in the UK and Ireland.
One of these was James Fleming – leading to the nickname ‘Dublin Jimmy’, which many knew him by.
His Dublin address in the 1980s was listed as Hill Crest, Cloughran, Swords. At one point he also listed an address in Slieve Foy Park, Louth – where he was charged with the theft of a Landrover in Meath in 1992.
But then, with too much heat from the authorities back home, he temporarily relocated to the UK living at addresses in Enfield, in Middlesex, and Brett House, Hertfordshire.
While living in Middlesex he was arrested at Dublin Airport in possession of counterfeit £20 notes. While at the Hertfordshire address in 1990, he was jailed in the UK for 18 months after he rammed a car of a creditor with a 20-tonne tipper truck before driving up the bonnet and crushing the passenger side of the car – with the terrified victim inside.
‘I thought that was it,’ the victim told the court. ‘I can’t believe anyone would be as big a lunatic as that.’
After his stint in Britain, McGuinness and his wife, Mary, occupied a site that straddled the border near Derrylin.
Officially, he was a scrap metal merchant, a car salesman and a refuse waste collector.
A limited company – Fermanagh Waste Recycling Ltd – was established in 2003, with Mary as a fellow director. But it was a front.
Unofficially, he stole trucks, tractors, cars, construction cranes, intimidated witnesses, laundered money, pulled ATM machines from walls, and engaged with just about every criminal opportunity that came along.
On the waste front he illegally exported 295,000 tonnes of domestic and possible clinical waste from the Republic into the North and on to remote sites in Scotland where it was buried.
Exposed by a BBC Spotlight investigation, the authorities acted and McGuinness was prosecuted, pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence.
By then the dumping operation had earned him in excess of €2m. In court, police testified that McGuinness ran a criminal gang that was one of the top 10 in Northern Ireland.
Then, in April 2008, McGuinness was arrested on foot of a European arrest warrant crossing between Serbia and Croatia.
He was wanted by the authorities in Belgium and the Netherlands who had identified him as the ringleader of an Irish criminal organisation that had stolen 20 trucks and cranes in 2006-2007.
McGuinness got away with the robberies – shipping the machines back to Ireland via Antwerp and the UK’s Tilbury port – until a tracker installed on a Dutch crane led police to his door.
McGuinness was ultimately extradited and served time in Belgium. Tractor thefts in Ireland immediately fell by more than 50%.
But it’s his hatred of the authorities – and his ever-lasting thirst for taunting them – that stands out throughout the life of Cyril McGuinness.
He has spat at gardaà and continuously abused police on both sides of the border.
‘F*** off you black b*****ds,’ he told a team of RUC officers who came to his Derrylin home in 1995 before he accused them of illegally entering the Republic.
At the time, McGuinness was living in a caravan that actually straddled the border and he delighted in stepping beyond reach into another jurisdiction. The ruse also worked against gardaÃ.
In 2017, he was sent for trial after he stole a Topaz fuel card through the window of a Garda car that had followed him, taunting the Garda occupants by stepping across the border.
‘Come on down here,’ he beckoned to the helpless officers.
On another occasion when gardaà tried to seize vehicles at his property, he jumped into a truck cab and tried to drive it across the border.
The same year he was found in possession of blank number plates and charged with fraud.
But no matter how many convictions he wracked up McGuinness never shied of taking legal cases against the authorities to recover any assets they seized from him.
He specialised in using the courts against the authorities as much as they used them against him.
This included a 2016 case in which he sought the return of £6,000 in cash in £50 notes wrapped in a blue plastic bag seized when he was stopped in his Mercedes at a police checkpoint.
On another occasion, in 2014, he succeeded in having a van returned to him by the courts after he’d been arrested driving it – even though the owner, who mysteriously failed to attend court, had reported it stolen.
Interestingly, it was not just him who took the legal route. His Dublin-based brother, articulated truck and car trader Fran McGuinness, argued in the High Court in 2017 that ‘I am not my brother’s keeper,’ and insisted that he had been estranged from his brother for 30 years.
Gardaà were forced to return a BMW car seized from a businessman almost nine years before and pay €33,600 in special damages.
