Sean Mackin: The young republican who fled to the US and now heads a multi-million pound Belfast property empire
A company led by a prominent Irish-American businessman who fled Northern Ireland as a young republican has emerged as a major landlord in west Belfast, with a multi-million pound property portfolio. Sean Mackin’s company, which has close links to a leading estate agent in the area, has bought dozens of properties across the city, mostly in the west, since setting up just over a decade ago. The properties are worth close to £4m.It is a remarkable journey for the New York-based businessman who fled Ireland as a young man in the early 1980s after repeated arrests and claimed torture. He spent years fighting deportation back to the north in one of the most high-profile cases of its type at the time.In 1992, Mr Mackin became the first Irish republican during the most recent conflict to successfully fight deportation from the US on political grounds. His wife and children were granted political asylum, also a first. Sean Mackin with Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald at an event in the US This followed an eight-year legal battle that drew support from leading politicians, Irish-American journalists and lawyers in the US and the north, including solicitor Pat Finucane, who travelled to New York to deliver testimony on Mr Mackin’s behalf just three months before his murder in February 1989.Mr Mackin became the founder and is the current chair of the New York Irish Center and is a long time and committed supporter of Friends of Sinn Féin, the US fundraising and lobbying arm of the party.In 2014, the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform honoured Mr Mackin for his work on behalf of the undocumented Irish.He was publicly honoured by the US Congress after being named Grand Marshall of the 2017 St Patrick’s Day parade in his adopted hometown of Eastchester in New York. The 67-year-old, who has run a successful plumbing business out of the Bronx for the last 20 years, declined to speak to The Irish News about his journey and achievements since his flight from the north in 1983.But it has emerged the father-of-three has made a significant impact on his native Belfast as a major player in the city’s property market after building up a portfolio of dozens of homes in the city, according to land registry filings. Scarsdale Properties LLP, of which Mr Mackin is a designated member along with his wife and two children, has investment properties worth £3.7m.The principal business of the company, incorporated in 2015, is property letting, latest annual accounts filed on Monday report. The company has close links to Northern Property, with which it shares a Falls Road office. A separate company, also with a registered office in the Northern Property premises, owns a major property in the city centre, at the corner of North Street and Royal Avenue. This company reported non-current assets, property, plant and equipment, of £1.2m.Northern Property has been subjected to sinister online attacks linked to the cost of renting in Belfast. Sean Mackin could hardly have imagined in the early 80s in his native west Belfast that he would now lead a company that owned such a significant number of properties in the same area.Scenes of rioting in west Belfast in the 1980s In interviews with US journalists during his fight against deportation, Mr Mackin said he joined the republican movement aged either 11 or 12. In the years leading up to his leaving for the US, he was associated with the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the political wing of the INLA.Many of those involved with the IRSP and the INLA at that time later died in internal feuds.Newspaper reports, including ones by noted Irish-American columnists Dennis Hamill and Jim Dwyer, recount how Mr Mackin was arrested multiple times, spent 22 months in confinement but was never charged with any offence.He described to Hamill one arrest: “It was 5:30 am and there was a knock on the door and the soldiers came in and took me from my bed and took me to the barracks in Andersontown, where I got my first beating. Punches and slaps to the face. Pulled my hair. “Then they asked me to give information on people I knew nothing about. So they turned me over to the RUC at Castlereagh in Belfast. Sean Mackin “Then it really started. I was pulled around the cell by the hair and they alternated beatings with interrogations. I was forced to do exercises; pushups and squatting until I couldn’t stand. “When I still refused to confess to their trumped-up charges they slapped and punched me, threw me to the ground by my hair and kicked living hell out of me and shouted, `Admit it, you bastard.’” Multiple reports state that Mr Mackin was one of the five most serious cases of torture cited in a blistering 1978 Amnesty International investigation. The Amnesty report, however, does not identify the individuals it concluded were tortured by the security forces. Mr Mackin told reporters he left for the US after receiving a death threat in the form of a Christmas card.In 1992, a federal immigration judge in Manhattan suspended the deportation of Mr Mackin and granted his family political asylum. Immigration lawyers said they would not appeal, effectively making the family the first political refugees from the north, his lawyer said.On a visit to Belfast in 2004, Mr Mackin, by then a US citizen, was controversially arrested by the PSNI and questioned about the 1983 murder of RUC reservist Colin Carson outside Cookstown RUC station. It caused an uproar among his supporters in the US, including congressmen, with one calling for a State Department investigation. He was quickly released.That alone illustrates how far the young radical, now local property magnate, had travelled.
