Update (24/11/24): John O’Heney denied this story when questioned about it during a candidate debate on Tipp Mid-West Radio (at around 19:45) and called this article a political attack by Sinn Féin. After he challenged my credibility, I updated this story with links to the recordings I used as my source. I am not nor have I ever been a member of any party, unlike Cllr. O’Heney, and if I was, it wouldn’t be Sinn Féin.
A local councillor and general election candidate in Tipp South bought Fine Gael memberships for friends and acquaintances so they could vote for him in a selection convention. Cllr. John O’Heney, a former teacher from Lattin, topped the poll as an independent in Cashel-Tipperary LEA earlier this year in his first bid for public office.
However, in a recording obtained by this reporter, O’Heney asks the recipient if they would be interested in “masquerading” as a member of Fine Gael for a couple of years in order to vote for him to be one of the party’s council candidates in the future. It is one of two voicemails or voice notes left by O’Heney that have circulated privately on social media in Tipp since before the local elections.
In the first recording (available to listen here), which I understand to date from 2022, O’Heney tells the recipient he may run for council in two years’ time and says that he’s “half-thinking of running, if I was running…as an independent” but that if that “didn’t work out”, he would “probably have to run under Fine Gael” as that’s his family background and he’d “have a little bit of support with them”.
He goes on to ask the recipient if they would allow O’Heney to sign them up as members of Fine Gael and pay their membership fee so they could vote for him at a future selection:
“I was just wondering if there’s any possibility that I could sign you up to be a member of Fine Gael this summer and next summer, so that you could possibly vote for me in that selection convention. […] You just go down and tick my name on a box, if I get enough ticks, I can run in the local elections. That’s basically it, it’s very simple.
But I’d pay the membership, the membership is twenty euros.”
He then tells the recipient if they’re interested to “send me on your name and address, and any of your family’s name and addresses that might be interested in just masquerading for two years”.
When I called Cllr. O’Heney, he stated the recordings were five years old and the matter had been “settled”, then ended the call. He did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Ireland has fixed terms of five years for local elections, so five years ago there was no local election in two years’ time. The recordings can only have been made in 2022 or 2017, two years before the 2024 and 2019 local elections respectively.
In the second recording (available to listen here), O’Heney tells the recipient to claim they reimbursed him the membership fee if questioned by Fine Gael headquarters or anyone else, and states that he “signed up about twenty people today using the same bank card and it may or may not look a little bit suspicious”.
He ultimately announced his independent candidacy in October 2023, some weeks before the selection for Cashel-Tipp LEA candidates on the 4th of December in Golden.
He ran a campaign primarily focused on his local activism and community work, promising to be “a strong voice for West Tipperary”. Since April last year, he has organised a “Sightsaver Bus” to take patients from Tipp to Belfast for medical procedures through the Northern Ireland Planned Healthcare Scheme.
It is unclear if or when he formally ceased his membership of Fine Gael. He announced he would contest the general election in September, less than three months after he was elected to council.
Earlier this year, I reported that O’Heney, in his capacity as a Commissioner for Oaths, witnessed hundreds of affidavits for the sham injunction pursued by the “No to Dundrum” campaign in an attempt to obstruct the accommodation of asylum seekers at Dundrum House Hotel. The scheme was the brainchild of Patrick McGreal, a vegetable farmer and conspiracy theorist from Westmeath, who convinced members of the anti-refugee group to take a case to the High Court based on his own bespoke brand of legal nonsense, though it was McGreal himself who made the application.
The application was refused by Justice David Holland, who was critical of affidavits featuring racist claims, including that asylum seekers were more likely to be burglars than hotel guests or Ukrainian refugees.
Neither O’Heney nor his general election opponent Mattie McGrath, who spent two days in the High Court supporting the injunction effort, responded to multiple requests for comment on that story.
Left in the Lurch 