Crime World
Episode 1365: Trio jailed over Kevin Lunney kidnap and torture lose appeal against convictions
27 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What happened during the abduction and torture of Kevin Lunney?
Kevin Lunney, who was a director in one of the companies that had formerly been owned by Sean Quinn, was abducted, falsely imprisoned, and then he was tortured effectively. He was stripped naked, bleach was thrown over his body. He suffered assaults and had QH carved into his chest. I mean, about as extreme a crime as this country has seen in recent times.
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Three men convicted in relation to the brutal kidnap and torture of businessman Kevin Lunny have failed in their bid to overturn the court's decision. Alan Hart, Alan O'Brien and Darren Redmond were hired during a campaign of intimidation against directors of former Sean Quinn companies.
And abducted Lunny broke his leg and beat him before branding his chest with the letters QIH or Quinn Industrial Holdings. Defence lawyers working for the men say they will now launch an appeal against the length of their sentences, which were 30, 28 and 18 years respectively. You're listening to Crime World, a podcast from crimeworld.com.
So anybody really who faces court, pleads not guilty, goes through a trial and ends up either with the mandatory life sentence for murder or very long sentences for, in this case, false imprisonment and intentionally causing harm. to Kevin Lunny, you will see appeals. They kind of come naturally.
So their lawyers will look for areas that they can either look to overturn the convictions or, you know, challenge the length of the sentences. Now, Alan Hart from Island Key Apartments, he's 44. Alan O'Brien, he was from East Wall, and Darren Redmond, who was 31, from Caledon Road in East Wall. Actually, all three were from East Wall, Eileen Quay Apartments.
They were all found guilty and they were sentenced to Hart, 30 years, O'Brien, 25 years, and Redmond, 18 years. their first kind of tranche of appeal has failed because they've gone to the Court of Appeal and they have put up some arguments to state that the convictions should be overturned, that they were, you know, that a wrong decision was made essentially.
Yeah, so people will remember the case. I think it's one of the most, look, people aren't going to forget it. I mean, Kevin Lunney, who was a director in one of the companies that had formerly been owned by Sean Quinn, was abducted, falsely imprisoned in a container near his home and then he was tortured effectively. He was stripped naked, bleach was thrown over his body.
He suffered assaults and had QH carved into his chest. I mean, about as extreme a crime as this country has seen in recent times.
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Chapter 2: Who are the convicted individuals involved in Kevin Lunney's case?
But at a particular point in time, as things were pretty dirty, There was firebomb attacks on the businesses he once owned. There was all sorts of things happening in the mountain as regards stuff was going into the glass factory that was ruining the production of the glass and costing money to the companies that were making it. There was, you know, tires being burst on very big vehicles.
there was at one point into the Quinn Insurance Company, a truck was driven in through the gates. It was all this sort of intimidation going on in the background.
Yes, and most of it was directed by a guy called Dublin Jimmy. who we spoke about recently on the podcast in connection with one of his associates going down. So Cyril McGuinness was his real name, Dublin Jimmy was what he was known as, no surprise he was from Dublin, from Swords. And Cyril McGuinness was an unusual type of gang boss, but a gang boss he was, who had been
involved in, I suppose, associated with the Provisional IRA, certainly not an IRA member, but had been involved in some of their smuggling operations. He'd moved up around the border area and had been involved in crimes across Europe. Spent time in a Russian gulag. spent time in a Russian gulag, had been prosecuted in Belgium, wasn't it, for... For kind of theft of industrial machinery.
Yes, and a lot of that type of crime, also being involved in cattle rustling and a lot of that sort of border smuggling crime that, you know, he'd become a very wealthy man. So, as you spoke about, the... As this long-running saga went on, Jubble and Jimmy was hired, basically, to carry out a campaign of intimidation for the people involved in the takeover of the Quinn businesses.
I suppose to sort of explain, after they all went into receivership, the receivers were then selling them on, I think a Spanish company came in and bought the glass factory. Some of the previous...
directors along with Quinn one of whom had been Kevin Lunny were placed back in positions in some of the companies that were they were trying to buy it out themselves between a number of directors and Quinn was always in the background Quinn's always wanted to claw back his empire Yes and of course he did have support from the local community because Sean Quinn had become Ireland's richest man as you said but he hadn't moved to the south of Dublin and you know invested all his money in
in, you know, abroad or anything. He kept all his businesses in the local area, so there was support for him. And one way or another, Dublin Jimmy, who presumably didn't care too much either way, became involved in this very, very extreme campaign of intimidation.
Some of it as small as just blocking roads off when trucks were coming back and forth, but also, as you described, some extreme violence. So, as, after Kevin Lunny was kidnapped and he was rescued by the guards, the instant suspicion would have fallen on Dublin Jimmy. Now, Alan Hart, Alan O'Brien and, uh, Darren Redmond, none of them obviously were living up in that border area.
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Chapter 3: What led to the appeals against the convictions of the kidnappers?
But Alan Hart is a particularly violent and dangerous criminal. I think he has over 180 convictions.
He was the one, he got the 30 years, he was really found to have inflicted most of the injuries on Lunny during the attack.
Yes, and a very, very dangerous criminal even before this incident. Now ultimately he served the conviction in relation to helping to dispose of the murder body of his friend Peter Gunn. The other charges in relation to the death of Peter Gunn were dropped and so he was subsequently named.
He went on trial at one point accused of murdering Gunn and it was said that he had been drinking with Gunn and a third man and then ultimately Peter Gunn had been stabbed to death and then there was a dispute between Alan Hart and the other man, both of whom sort of effectively blamed each other.
So Alan Hart was, you know, a very, very dangerous, violent criminal who had been involved in all sorts of criminality. And that, yeah, it's believed he was brought up and did this. So this week we heard
this appeal and the appeal centres around a number of issues so at one point there was DNA was taken from a van and this van was believed to have Kevin Lunny was not suspected of being in the van but they basically the three men were believed to have been travelling in this van and Now they got some DNA samples off this van.
I think of Kevin Lunny, the state's case was that the DNA had come from those men abducting Kevin Lunny and then they transplanted that DNA onto the van. Now the van was, you know, tests were done and the van was taken into police custody. but there had been a fire at the station and the van had been destroyed. So that was one of the grounds on which they appealed it.
Yes, the lawyer said that that evidence, that DNA evidence should never have been before the court because it couldn't have been essentially checked in the aftermath or inspected by defence experts because the van was destroyed by the time they were taking the case.
Yeah. For their clients. Then there was the other ground, that was rejected by the special criminal court. The other grounds, I suppose, are kind of standard grounds for the appeals. One of them was in relation to the use of phone evidence. And the phone evidence, it was actually a really, really long case. And the phone evidence was quite central. And I won't get into it.
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Chapter 4: How did the background of Sean Quinn influence the case?
That would have been a good job, a well-earning job, certainly back in the day when taxis were protected. His father was also at some point registered, I think, as a dairy farm manager. And also people would say he was involved in street trading, not, you know... as a lot of people in Dublin would have been over the years, involved in some stalls and selling in that sort of arena.
So, Christy Kinnan is raised in Cabra, but his birth certificate says that he was born in England, in a place called Perryvale, near Ealing, I think, in London. So this is the late 1950s when at that time in Irish history, we were, you know, there was high unemployment. A huge number of people left Ireland to go to England at times to get work.
Many of them returned, but that would have been one of the big points of emigration where young couples got married and went over there. Certainly, Christy Kenan wasn't raised in England, but he certainly does seem to have had lived there at times. He's had connections to Birmingham and that sort of area, maybe all his life.
So he's described, I suppose, as a middle class, having a middle class upbringing.
Well, I suppose the first house that we can look upon that we know he was in as a child, and he was the only boy in a family of three girls, Denise, Maria and Sally-Anne. The mother appears to run a B&B from what is a generous Edwardian house. Do you know the name of the road?
Charlville Road. So, I mean, yeah, I know it well. I mean, I would have grown up very close to there. I mean, those houses are worth a huge amount of money.
Now, like a lot of houses in that area, for example, those big houses on the North Circular Road, which aren't far away, there probably would have been times where you would have picked them up at a bargain price, but it would be very, very far away from some of the figures we've discussed, for example, the grinding poverty in which Gerry Hutch would have been born into poverty.
Certainly Christy Kinnan would have been raised in something that's now worth a huge amount of money, that home.
Would they have always been a middle class sort of a home? We're using that term very loosely here.
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