The person who paid the gang that tortured businessman Kevin Lunney needs to be identified and "brought to heel", one of Mr Lunney's fellow directors at Quinn Industrial Holdings (QIH) has said.
John McCartin made the comment when talking about the apparent progress being made by the Garda in relation to identifying the gang that abducted and tortured Mr Lunney last week.
Speaking on the Claire Byrne Live programme on RTÉ One, Mr McCartin said it was a good thing the Garda was apparently making progress in its investigations, "but to find this gang is not enough.
“We need to establish who is behind this, who has perpetrated this, who has procured the services of these people, because you can take the foot soldiers out of action and more will be bought, and more will be deployed. This will continue to happen until the person who is behind it is brought to heel.”
Both Mr Lunney and Mr McCartin have been repeatedly threatened on social media, to their faces, and in correspondence over recent years because of the role they are playing in running businesses on the Cavan-Fermanagh border that were formerly owned by Sean Quinn.
Mr Lunney continues to receive treatment in hospital after the savage attack he suffered apparently at the hands of a gang of local criminals who abducted him on his way home from work.
‘Kangaroo court’
Mr McCartin said material posted on Facebook referred to him and Mr Lunney as having been found guilty by a “kangaroo court”and stated that justice would be “administered” to them in the same fashion as it had been to the Shankill butchers.
Despite their efforts over years to have Facebook take the threats taken down, they were not taken down until Sunday night, he said.
Asked how he would feel driving home from the studio in Dublin, Mr McCartin, who is married and has five children, said it was a “dark, wet night” and his house was up a long driveway. “You have to wonder what awaits you.”
He said he would feel more comfortable if somebody knew where he was at all times, and wondered whether Mr Lunney would have been attacked if he’d had a security detail assigned to him at the time.
He said the “barbarity” of what had happened to Mr Lunney was “stark”, and he was still coming to terms with it.
He also said he and his fellow directors wanted to be able to continue with their work and to protect the jobs that the QIH businesses provided in an otherwise economically deprived area. “We should be allowed to do that without being attacked.”
Asked about people who wanted Mr Quinn to be still involved in the running of his former businesses, Mr McCartin said everyone was disappointed that Mr Quinn couldn’t return to his businesses after the economic collapse.
“But this is not a fractured community. This is not a community with factions. This is a united, law-abiding community who are respectful of the efforts that were made to build all those businesses down through the years, but are also respectful and thankful for the efforts that are being made to preserve those businesses and preserve those jobs.
Marian Harkin, a former Independent MEP for the Midlands, North and West, said she had spoken with Mr Lunney on Friday. "I have no words to describe what has happened to good decent people," she said. "There is something very, very wrong."
