The Co Kerry garden centre once run by Nathan McDonnell was doing a brisk trade on Thursday. The Buttermilk Restaurant, which he expanded having been advised by consultants that it was the most profitable part of the business, was busy with people enjoying the fine fare.
It is all a long way from Portlaoise Prison where McDonnell is serving a 12-year sentence for drugs trafficking in a criminal enterprise with links to a Mexican drugs cartel.
Ballyseedy Garden Centre is now trading as Fairtree Village and an air of normality abounds. Staff at both the Meadows and Byrne homeware and Edinburgh Woollen Mill concessions were helping customers with inquiries about tables, throws and clothes. Outside, the compact Kingdom Garden Centre was relatively quiet.
Any customers passing through were unwilling to offer a view on what had befallen McDonnell and his business. Staff were similarly reluctant to talk.
The jailing of McDonnell for his part in a plan by the Sinaloa cartel to export €32 million worth of crystal meth to Australia marks a spectacular fall for a man who was once hailed as one of the brightest entrepreneurs in the Kingdom.
At the sentencing hearing of the 44-year-old father of three at the Special Criminal Court last Friday, Ms Justice Melanie Greally remarked that to describe him as “a mere cog in the wheel” was to underestimate his role in the international drug smuggling operation.
It is a week since his sentencing and more than a year since McDonnell was arrested and charged in connection with the discovery of the huge drugs haul in a container at the Port of Cork. The Tralee man is still very much the talk of the town.
“You‘ll find very few people who will go on the record,” said one local person who wished to remain anonymous “but anytime you talk to people in town this week, Nathan is the conversation, the fall from grace and how he cost his mother and his family their business.”
The details of McDonnell’s demise are well documented – how gardaí raided a house in Listowel in Kerry on June 6th, 2023, and found a number of mobile phones and documents which led to bank accounts which, on analysis, revealed the movement of hundreds of thousands of euros.
The trail led to Ballyseedy Garden Centre, where gardaí mounted a surveillance operation and on February 12th, 2024, they watched McDonnell forklift a machine designed to separate metals into a container to be transported to the Port of Cork for export to Australia.
Three days later, gardaí and customs officers, who had been watching the machine at Ringaskiddy, cut it open and found 546kg of methylamphetamine, also known as crystal meth.
McDonnell’s world came crashing down around him, costing him his business, his reputation and his liberty.
A familiar face on the local social scene with his Dublin-born wife, Jackie O’Duffy, McDonnell cut a dashing figure around Tralee in his Porsche and designer clothes. He participated in the Ballymac Strictly Come Dancing competition and judged the Best Dressed Man Competition at the Listowel Races.
In December 2021, he was elected president of Tralee Chamber Alliance, announcing: “Tralee is a fantastic town with massive potential, but we need to get better at telling our story to the world – we need more jobs and industry but we can’t sit on our hands waiting for them to find us.”
It appeared he had the business acumen to back up his talk as he rapidly expanded Ballyseedy Garden Centre. It was a business his mother, Bernie Falvey, had developed after she bought the modest operation from her uncle Dermot Kerins in 1992.
It wasn’t a huge surprise in one sense to discover he ended up a patsy for a major drugs gang
When McDonnell’s father Michael and Falvey separated, she raised five children on her own while expanding the garden centre from a small plot of land with an office in a mobile home, into an impressive operation with a restaurant and concession spaces.
McDonnell’s real involvement began in 2005 when, following his secondary education at The Green in Tralee, he studied horticulture at Writtle College at Chelmsford in Essex, England. He later moved to Australia before returning to join his mother in the business, eventually becoming chief executive.
It was while he was running the company’s second garden centre at Carrigtwohill in Co Cork that he was approached by Down Syndrome Cork seeking sponsorship for their Tour de Munster. This was the start of his growing involvement with the charity.
One person involved in the fundraiser recalled: “He used to help us out putting up the marquee and the bouncy castles for the tour launches – this was 15 years ago or so, he would have been in his late 20s and single at the time and I remember thinking he had everything going for him – tall, good-looking guy with a successful business.
“I got a land when I learned he had been charged with drug dealing because certainly in all his dealings with Down Syndrome Cork he just came across as a very decent guy with a thriving business.”
On the surface all continued to appear well – McDonnell was appearing on Virgin Media’s AM programme to give gardening advice, was involved in a bid by Motorsport Ireland to bring the World Rally Championship to Kerry and had a share in a promising racehorse, Stumptown.
But while the business had expanded to a total of 11 companies with a combined turnover of almost €5 million, behind the facade all was not well. A €4 million loan taken out in 2007 to expand the business continued to weigh heavily on the balance sheet.One of the companies, Ballyseedy Properties Ltd, later took out a restructuring loan of €2 million from a Limerick lender. The High Court heard last November that Ballyseedy Restaurants Ltd owed Revenue more than €1 million, prompting the tax authority to seek the winding up of the business.
A number of suppliers were left owed thousands of euro. The winding up of Ballyseedy Restaurants fed into the narrative proffered by McDonnell’s legal team at the Special Criminal Court that he was a man under severe financial pressure when he agreed to store the drugs for €150,000.
In the photo taken by local photographer Domnick Walsh when he was first charged at Tralee District Court, McDonnell looked haunted, grey and gaunt.
“Nathan was an imposing figure, a tall handsome man and very engaging company,” said one local in Tralee. “He was in the media a lot and was a very good speaker at events, and he was involved in a lot of charity gigs, so there was a real shock when the news broke that he was involved in the drugs business.
“There is sympathy for his own family, his wife and kids and his mother but there’s no getting away from what he was trying to do – crystal meth is a community-destroying drug wherever it was going and that damages an entire community so there’s not much sympathy for him.”
Someone else who knew him well offered a similar view: “People see him as a fellow who got into financial difficulties and went down this route, but people are aware of the pain drugs cause in communities, so while there is sympathy for his family, there is very little for him personally.”
Yet another local, who acknowledged McDonnell was a good employer, said that there was huge sympathy for his mother, who is now in her 70s, particularly given the hard work she put into building up the business over the past 30 years.
While Falvey was seen locally as a “grafter” who made Ballyseedy a success, her son was already running out of goodwill with many in Tralee when the end finally came, one local said.
“He would have been known as someone who didn’t always pay his bills – I know of several business people in town who had to chase him time and again to get their money and then they would see him swanning about at Listowel Races or at some ball or other and that rankled with a lot of people,” they said.
McDonnell was seen as “very flash” and “a bit of a yuppie” with his expensive car and clothes, said the local.
“He never struck me as the sharpest tool in the shed; he was very suave but not always the brightest, so it wasn’t a huge surprise in one sense to discover he ended up a patsy for a major drugs gang.”
