Sean McGovern, one of Ireland’s most wanted men, thought he was out of reach in Dubai – until a dramatic turn after a long campaign
15:20, 26 Dec 2025Updated 16:00, 26 Dec 2025
Members of the Gardai armed support unit outside The Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin ahead of the court appearance of Sean McGovern(Image: Brian Lawless/PA Wire)
Late on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 28, an Air Corps Casa C295 plane sped along a baking hot runway before smoothly taking off and soaring into the sky.
The €120 million plane had been delivered to the Air Corps almost two years earlier and was designed as a maritime patrol aircraft.
Its normal mission is patrolling the seas around Ireland, watching out for rogue trawlers, Russian spy ships – and boats trying to smuggle cocaine into the country.
But today the plane and its crew were on no ordinary mission.
Instead, they were starting off on a 7,600km journey from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates – bringing one of Ireland’s most wanted men home to Ireland to face justice.
Dubliner Sean McGovern, a key lieutenant of Irish cartel boss Daniel Kinahan, was flanked by armed Garda detectives during the 24-hour flight that brought him back to his hometown.
Sean McGovern arriving back to Ireland on the Air Corps Airbus after his extradition from Dubai at Casement Aerodrome Baldonnel, Dublin this evening(Image: Sam Boal/Collins Courts)
Within minutes of landing at the Casement Aerodrome, the HQ of the Air Corps in Baldonnel, south County Dublin, the 39-year-old was arrested, charged with a gun murder and four other serious offences and whisked to the Special Criminal Court.
The high-speed journey from Baldonnel to the court in central Dublin took just 14 minutes – but had been years in the making.
Gardai had been hunting for McGovern, accused by US authorities of being a key leader in the Kinahan gang, ever since the December 2016 murder in Clondalkin of Noel Kirwan.
Sean McGovern(Image: Mick O’Neill)
Mr Kirwan, 62, was gunned down by the cartel at the height of the Kinahan Hutch feud – a war that left as many as 18 men dead.
Gardai believe the cartel murdered him because he was seen with top target Gerry “The Monk” Hutch at the funeral of his brother Eddie Hutch, 58, in February 2016.
Noel Kirwan, left, with Gerry Hutch(Image: REUTERS/Stringer)
Gardai gathered enough evidence to prosecute McGovern for the murder and other offences – but he was out of reach in Dubai, which had no extradition treaty with Ireland.
The Justice Minister Helen McEntee and Garda Commissioner Drew Harris undertook a long campaign to get the Dubai authorities on side and that paid off in October 2024, when they arrested McGovern in his desert bolthole.
It took another seven months of dogged diplomacy but finally, on May 28, the Irish authorities got their man.
McGovern is likely to stand trial at some stage next year. A conviction would be a major coup for gardai – but they are hoping 2026 brings them back to Dubai on an Air Corps plane for even bigger targets.
The three Kinahan men, Christy, 68, Daniel, 48 and Christopher Junior, 45, all live in the Gulf state – and all are in the sights of Garda units.
Officers have sent files to the Director of Public Prosecutions asking for all three to be charged with serious offences back in Dublin.
The DPP is considering those files and a decision is likely early in the new year. If the decision is for a charge, gardai will use a recently signed extradition treaty with the UAE to get them back home.
The McGovern trial promises to be seismic – but it would pale into insignificance for that trio, the Garda’s top targets.
But the three men are understood to have been undeterred by McGovern’s fate and are still enjoying life in Dubai – and leading the massive drugs consortium that bears their name.
It has been business as usual for the cartel – it is still bringing millions of euro worth of cocaine from South America to Europe and is selling plenty of it to Irish gangs.
And it also emerged this year that they teamed up with Russians to try to evade sanctions placed on them by US authorities three years ago.
In November, it emerged that gardai have taken part in a huge international operation targeting a billion euro money laundering network that was being used by the likes of the Kinahan cartel and other criminal gangs.
Several people have already been arrested in this country and almost €2 million in cash has been seized in Ireland in the past two years, gardai say.
The international operation dubbed Operation Debilitise involves the UK’s National Crime Agency and gardai, and has identified a vast Russian money laundering operation which was being used to help them evade financial sanctions imposed by the invasion of Ukraine.
Investigators were able to establish that the network, which has been active in the UK and Ireland, had purchased a bank in Kyrgyzstan to aid in that effort to avoid US sanctions, and to fund criminal cells across the globe in also concealing their wealth.
One such group that benefited from the network was the Kinahan cartel, which was laundering its money through the service in an effort to evade sanctions imposed upon them by the US Department of Treasury in April 2022.
But thanks to the efforts of gardai and the NCA, the cash-to-cryptocurrency swap system has been identified. Gardai have announced that they managed to arrest eight people and seized close to €2million in alleged dirty money as part of the operation so far.
Kinahan crime gang
Some €1.36million of that was seized in the West Dublin area this year –and the rest across the country since 2023, gardai said.
The Kinahans were not the only gangsters in the Garda’s sights this year – at home or abroad. In September, we travelled to The Hague in the Netherlands where we interviewed a Garda detective sergeant who is on secondment there with Europol, the EU’s policing agency.
She told us she is aware of several Irish gangs operating in Europe – and they are trying to fill the vacuum caused by the gardai dismantling the Kinahan cartel and its flight to Dubai.
She told us: “I would say that there are gangs in Ireland that are active in Europe. I suppose fulfilling [the Kinahans’] role would be fair to say, trying to take over as drugs kingpins in Europe.”
The officer says some areas where Irish people were involved in criminality in Europe – such as fraud – ebbed and flowed, but gangsters from here were always involved in drugs schemes on the continent.
She says: “They are constant. There’s always an issue in respect of drug trafficking – that doesn’t go away. Other crime areas for us ebb and flow, we might see an increase in this or an increase in something else.
“I might be doing nothing but labour exploitation for six months, and then something else comes in, but the drugs trafficking element is a constant.”
When asked if there was much of an Irish criminal presence in Europe, she replied: “I would say yes, even on the lower scale.”
She added: “We’re constantly getting checks of somebody committing a crime in another country, even just on a once-off basis, or… money going to Irish accounts or activities of somebody in a country where they want to follow up on somebody.
“We obviously have links for Irish criminals in Spain and the Netherlands and places like that. We have links to other countries as well, like we have links to South America, not really the US.
“I’d say the main hotspot is Spain, really, and the UK. We have links to UK, obviously. I know that there are Irish people traveling in Europe and South America engaging in drug trafficking.
“We’ve ongoing cases in relation to Irish gangs and Irish individuals collaborating with persons in other countries in Europe to move drugs, to move weapons. It’s a lucrative business.”
One of the gangs active in Europe is the Family, an outfit based in west Dublin that has become Ireland’s biggest drugs gang.
It is now the Garda Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau’s main target and makes at least €10 million a month from selling cocaine, heroin and cannabis on the streets of Dublin.
In March, gardai teamed up with Spain’s Guarda Civil to mount an international operation against them. Spanish cops seized drugs worth €25million and disrupted their main smuggling route to Ireland. There were arrests in Ireland and Spain. That probe is set to continue into 2026.
Earlier in March, then Garda Commissioner Drew Harris admitted to us that international cartels were using Ireland as a transport route to smuggle drugs into the rest of Europe.
Former Garda Commissioner Drew Harris(Image: Collins)
Speaking at a cross-border policing conference in Belfast, now retired Mr Harris said his officers seized more drugs in recent massive shipments than the market in all 32 counties of Ireland could support – which indicates their final destinations were outside the island.
Mr Harris said there was evidence gangs were working as franchises – or cooperating – for shipments, but he added: “But we’ve also seen very major cartels from Central America also using Ireland as a transport route.
“You can see the amount of drugs that we recovered in terms of our coastal operations – and that’s very significant as well; far more drugs than actually that would be required for the market here in Ireland, and that’s the entire island.
“We must be very aware of the threat there is from that and how it’s been exploited by cartels in a transatlantic route.”
But the Commissioner added he was determined that Ireland would not become easy prey to the cartels. And he indicated that government plans to purchase primary radar and even fighter jets could help us counter the threat of planes being used to smuggle drugs into Ireland.
Just last year, a man was jailed for 11 years after he admitted using an airfield in Ireland to fly in cocaine with €8.4million – and gardai believe that was not the first shipment.
Mr Harris said: “We certainly don’t want to be a weak spot. I would point to the various capabilities which are coming on stream for ourselves, and there’ll be more about that over the next few months, but particularly in respect of aircraft and our capabilities there and patrolling the western seaboard.”
Justin Kelly succeeded Mr Harris as Commissioner in September – and is now nearly four months in the job, But as Deputy he did give a stark insight into the reality of gangland in Ireland. He told the Policing Authority in January that some parents were wearing body armour to drop their kids off to school.
New Commissioner of An Garda Síochána, Justin Kelly, following his first press conference at Walter Scott House in Dublin. Picture date: Tuesday September 2, 2025(Image: Niall Carson/PA Wire)
He was speaking after it emerged gardai had opened intelligence files on seven children under the age of 12 last year – down from more than 400 four years ago. The practice is now subject of an audit.
The meeting heard that in many cases the intelligence files were created over fears that children were at risk – including from gangland.
Deputy Commissioner Kelly told the authority: “It’s if, say, that person was under threat themselves, so the child themselves was a target for some reason.”
“Unfortunately, we have organised criminal groups doing all sorts.”
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