How former GAA manager Séamus ‘Banty’ McEnaney made over €200m from housing refugees and the homeless

Séamus McEnaney during his second stint as Monaghan manager in 2022. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho

Almost seven years ago the Government started moving newly arrived asylum seekers into hotels and B&Bs on a temporary basis because the State’s direct provision system was full.

By early 2019 almost 6,600 international protection applicants were living in the Republic. A few hundred of these were living in emergency accommodation.

Today almost 33,000 applicants are living in State-provided accommodation with 25,000 in emergency accommodation. An average of 1,000 people are arriving in Ireland each month seeking protection each month, according to the Department of Justice.

A letter from the secretary general of the Department of Integration to the Public Accounts Committee reveals that the Government first approached a company called Brimwood Ltd in September 2018 for help in securing additional accommodation for asylum seekers.

The department contacted Brimwood on a recommendation from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, which had previously used property provided by the company, according to the letter sent in 2023.

[ Séamus McEnaney family group was paid €24m in three months for homeless and refugee housing ]

It details how Brimwood Ltd subsequently entered into contracts with the Reception and Integration Agency, now the International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS), “either directly in its own hotels or indirectly by sourcing accommodation in other hotels and guest houses that they lease from the owners through their own contractual arrangements.”

Brimwood was the only intermediary used by IPAS between 2018 and 2021 to source this housing.

Seven years later, Brimwood Unlimited continues supplying accommodation for asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees across the country, earning €24 million in State contracts last year. The company received €5.6 million in IPAS payments during the first three months of the year.

The directors of Brimwood are Séamus McEnaney (57) and his daughters Sarah (26) and Laura (32). It is an unlimited company so it does not have to publish financial accounts where it might show the profits it makes.

Companies owned by the former Monaghan GAA manager and his wider family were also paid more than €14 million for housing asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees in the first three months of this year.

There were paid additional sums of more than €10 million for providing accommodation to homeless people to Dublin City Council in the same period.

Overall the family companies are estimated to have been paid more than €200 million for the provision of emergency accommodation since late 2018.

Séamus ‘Banty’ McEnaney, born and raised in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, was the youngest of five brothers in a family of nine children. He earned the nickname ‘Banty’ from his father who declared his youngest son was a “banty hen” because of the barrel chest he had as a child due to poor health.

McEnaney left school at 11 and started working in a local bar. Within a few years, he was holding down a day job in the local chicken house and worked nights at Oasis outside the town, described in the 1980s as Ireland’s biggest nightclub.

A few years after opening Banty’s Bar in 1987, McEnaney and his brothers purchased the Fiddler’s Elbow, a popular local restaurant and nightclub in Carrickmacross. The group of brothers continued to build their property portfolio through the 1990s and early 2000s.

McEnaney and his brothers also played for the local Corduff GAA football team; his brother Pat went on to become a high-profile GAA referee.

One former schoolmate of the brothers recalls how closely knit the family were – “the joke was if you kicked one of the McEnaneys, all five would come limping after you”. Séamus, who was always the frontman in business dealings, has “great charisma and energy” but also an “unshakeable self-confidence”, says the former schoolmate.

In 2005, shortly after purchasing the Westenra Arms Hotel in Monaghan town, McEnaney took over as manager of Monaghan GAA football team, a position he held until 2010.

After a two-year stint managing Meath, McEnaney managed Wexford in 2016 but stepped down the following year. He returned to Monaghan, managing the senior team from 2019 to 2022.

“He lit a fire under that team after 15 years of being in the doldrums,” says the schoolmate. “He was a great motivator but not a great strategist. There’s still a question whether he was a successful manager – he was and he wasn’t.”

Then Monaghan manager Séamus McEnaney talks to the squad after a game in 2001. Photograph: Morgan Treacy/Inpho

The McEnaney family was badly hit by the recession. In 2011 a High Court judgment of almost €13.5 million was secured by AIB against McEnaney. The debt, McEnaney said at the time, related to development land.

Shortly before the Covid pandemic, news of the McEnaney family’s rapidly growing earnings through IPAS contracts began to spread.

Football fans at one preseason Monaghan game shouted abuse from the stands at McEnaney, according to one prominent figure in Ulster GAA, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“It’s massively changed how people see him,” says the GAA figure.

“Making money off the back of this would really irk people. There’s obviously people who have a gripe about him doing well with this. The family always drive big cars and are in corporate boxes; they’re not afraid to splash it – and that creates begrudgery.”

The State’s almost exclusive reliance on private companies, such as those owned by the McEnaney family, to house international protection applicants, is unusual in a European context.

A 2022 report from the European Asylum Support Office found most EU countries use State-owned centralised systems or mixed models – State authorities and civil society or private operators – to house asylum seekers.

In the UK, state contracts are a source of great wealth for private operators. In May, Graham King, founder of the migrant-housing company Clearsprings Ready Homes, acquired the unofficial title of Britain’s “asylum billionaire” after he joined the Sunday Times Rich List of new billionaires.

Nick Henderson, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council

Relying on private companies to secure housing for asylum seekers is “significantly eroding public confidence” in our asylum system, says Irish Refugee Council chief executive Nick Henderson.

“We don’t need our own asylum billionaire,” he says. “These people are providing a service and they’re making money from it but it’s not necessarily their fault. The fault ultimately lies with the State.”

The lack of independent inspections of these centres is also concerning, says Henderson. Since January 2024, the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) has carried out periodic inspections of permanent IPAS centres, which represent just 11 per cent of the 324 centres across the State.

Standards in emergency accommodation vary widely, from tented accommodation, to private rooms in hotels and dormitory-style accommodation in repurposed office buildings. A spokesman for the Department of Justice said it was involved in “regular unannounced inspections of the accommodation centres to encourage compliance”.

“People residing in emergency accommodation tend to experience poorer standards” and live in “more random or unsuitable locations”, says Henderson.

Spending millions of euro on this housing is “ultimately a dead spend,” he adds.

“Let’s accommodate people in a way that benefits residents but also gives integrity to the system,” he says. “That requires very significant political will, to wean the Government off its reliance on emergency accommodation.”

Mike Allen, director of advocacy with homeless charity Focus Ireland, says this same reliance on private contractors to secure homeless housing has become a policy of “repeated short-termism”.

Constantly operating in crisis mode, without a long-term strategy, leaves the State in a “weak bargaining position” where local authorities are “almost begging private providers to find accommodation”, says Allen.

“In some way, homeless people become implicated in this waste of public money,” he adds.

Like Henderson, he says his criticisms are not directed at providers such as McEnaney but lie with government for creating a system almost entirely reliant on the private sector.

Successive government housing policies have created a situation where many refugees with permission to live and work in the State are unable to find a place to live and must turn to local authorities for support, says Allen.

As a result, some of these could end up in State-provided accommodation “owned by the same landlord but operated by a different arm of the State”.

His comments echo those of Dublin Region Housing Executive director Mary Hayes who told an Oireachtas Committee on housing last month that the homeless system had become the “institutional discharge from one institution to another”.

The main factor driving adult-only homelessness is people leaving direct provision, according to the latest DRHE figures.

Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute, says some European international protection systems, including the Irish model, have developed a “permanent temporariness” in their approach to asylum.

“What you’re effectively doing is warehousing people in the absence of a longer-term plan,” he says.

Susan Fratzke, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, says an ability by government to “flex up and flex down” in response to unpredictable changes in migration patterns, driven by war and climate change, is a key element of long-term asylum planning.

She argues that while State-owned properties are a key element of a functioning asylum housing system, reliance on private contractors is also important.

She says European governments need to plan for fluctuation so when numbers decrease, they can prepare for the next surge.

“This causes political tension because governments don’t like to say we’re planning for a rise in asylum claims, they prefer to talk about what they’re doing to reduce numbers,” she says.

“But they could save money by being more realistic about these numbers. That requires political will.”

A Department of Justice spokesman said the Government was working towards “developing a more stable and sustainable accommodation system in the long term” and was moving away from reliance on the private sector through the purchase of “more accommodation on State-owned lands”. This includes the recent purchase of Citywest Hotel and campus.

The Department of Housing has made a similar commitment for homeless people – a spokesman said efforts are ongoing to reduce reliance on private emergency accommodation and secure supported housing operated by NGOs.

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