“He’s the only man who delivers for us,” says Philly Carroll from Thurles, Co Tipperary, when asked about her local TD Michael Lowry.
“He’s simply the best.”
It’s a sunny morning on Liberty Square in Thurles and two weeks have passed since Lowry learned he would not face a criminal prosecution arising from a tribunal’s investigation into him. Anyone here who has a bad word to say about the veteran Independent politician declines to be interviewed by The Irish Times.
Most who are approached are fans, including some teenage schoolboys who say they will vote for Lowry when they are old enough.
“He’s a good lad – he does great stuff around here,” says one of the boys.
Carroll quickly shuts the topic down when asked about the controversy that has dogged Lowry over the course of his career.
“Look, it’s like this,” she says. “You’re in the wrong town.”
Elected as a Fine Gael councillor for Tipperary North Riding in 1979, Lowry (73) was first elected a TD for Tipperary North in 1987. When he topped the poll in the 2024 general election, it was the seventh consecutive election in which he secured the most votes.
Alongside his political work, Lowry has a successful refrigeration business, property interests and an involvement with thoroughbred horses that includes links to the Coolmore Stud, the famous bloodstock operation based in Fethard, Co Tipperary.
Born in March 1953, Lowry went straight from school into the workplace. He soon set up his own refrigeration business, Streamline Enterprises, with Dunnes Stores as its major customer.
By the early 1990s he was a trustee of the Fine Gael party and one of its major fundraisers. He was appointed a government minister in 1994 and was, for a time, seen as a likely future leader of the party and a potential taoiseach. But then he suffered a dramatic fall from grace that has left questions ever since about his suitability for public office.
In 1996, the Irish Independent revealed businessman Ben Dunne had directed that renovation work totalling about £395,000 on Lowry’s new home near Thurles be charged in the books of Dunnes Stores. The report stated the money was marked down as expenditure on the supermarket group’s outlet in the Ilac Centre, Dublin.
High-profile inquiries into his affairs, including by Revenue, went on for years. They culminated in the finding of the Moriarty payments-to-politicians tribunal in 2011. The tribunal found Lowry had received financial support from businessman Denis O’Brien and had in turn interfered, as minister for communications, in the process that led to O’Brien’s Esat consortium being awarded the State’s second mobile phone licence in 1996. The licence set O’Brien on a path to significant wealth.
Businessman Denis O’Brien is linked to Michael Lowry through the Moriarty tribunal. File photograph: Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Lowry and O’Brien rejected the tribunal’s findings but they continue to hang over both men.
Despite the years of controversy, Lowry played a key role in the formation of the current Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Government. The Regional Independent Group of TDs, of which Lowry is a member, agreed to support the Coalition after the 2024 general election.
He also has his own local mini-party, Team Lowry, from which five councillors were re-elected to Tipperary County Council in the 2024 local elections, including his son Micheál Lowry.
“I suppose it’s typical Irish parish-pump politics,” says Andrew O’Connor, from Thurles.
“He gets the support because he comes across with projects that he’s been involved with, whether it’s roads or hospitals or whatever it is. He comes across for Tipperary.”
People in Tipperary are as concerned about honesty in business and politics as people anywhere else, says Tommy Cooke, a farmer and entrepreneur from just outside Thurles. But, he adds, they make their own judgment in respect of the tribunal’s findings and balance this against what they know about Lowry as a local TD.
“I can’t imagine anyone else surviving that amount of slings and arrows, you know, and still stand in public and get the respect of the people,” he says.
“That’s really the test that I see in the end of the day . . . People look at him, they understand the whole thing and [they] still respect him.”
It’s not just as a politician that Lowry has managed to survive and prosper.
“He’s doing well. He’s a millionaire today,” says Micheal Barry from Ballycahill, near Holycross, who adds he’s known Lowry all his life. “He’s doing okay.”
Streamline Refrigeration Ltd, which is 75 per cent owned by Lowry, made a profit of €680,143 in 2024, up from €198,006 the previous year, according to its latest accounts. A second company in the group, Garuda Unlimited, trading as Streamline Enterprises, is 100 per cent owned by Lowry and was subject to a €1.4 million tax settlement 20 years ago. Garuda Unlimited does not publish financial accounts.
According to its website, Streamline provided services to Lidl’s major redistribution centres in Westmeath, Kildare and Cork. It also assisted a refrigeration upgrade project at Circle K stations, comprising 130 outlets.
Other customers and former customers listed on the website include supermarket chains Supervalu, Dunnes, Tesco and Aldi. The business is understood to have more than 20 vans on the road and both of Lowry’s sons, Micheál and Jonathan, are involved.
Lowry’s home outside Holycross sits on 35 acres of land. He is also the owner, since 2020, of a 3.75-acre development site at the rear of the company’s premises on Abbey Road, Thurles, though not the site of the premises itself, according to Tailte Éireann land files. There is no mortgage registered against the 3.75-acre site.
Since 2022, Garuda is the owner of 6 Dún Lia, a detached house in a small residential estate in Thurles. It is also, since 2019, the owner of 1 Montrose Avenue, a semidetached house in Foxwood, Kilbarry, Co Waterford. In his latest declaration of interests, Lowry says he is a landlord in respect of the Kilbarry property. His son Micheál, who also lives in Holycross, lists 6 Dún Lia as the registered address of a waste-management company he part-owns, Lojon Developments Ltd, in his declaration of interests to Tipperary County Council.
Both the Tipperary and Waterford houses are registered with the Residential Tenancies Board, which requires all privately rented properties to be registered with it.
Garuda is also, since 2019, the owner of 38.8 acres of land at Townagha, near Twomileborris, Co Tipperary. There are no mortgages registered against any of the Garuda properties.
Lowry’s interest in thoroughbred horses dates back, at least, to 2012, when he incorporated a bloodstock company called Glebeland Farm Unlimited. The company is owned equally by Lowry, his daughter Lorraine and his son Jonathan.
He is also involved in two bloodstock partnerships, Glebeland Partnership, and Glebeland Farm Partnership, while his son Jonathan is the owner of JL Bloodstock Ltd, a bloodstock company incorporated in 2018 with an address in Townagha (not the Garuda property).
Glebeland Farm is the registered owner of 10.8 acres of land at Gortnahoe, a village near Thurles, since 2015. That land that was previously owned by Abbeygreen Consulting, which is a company majority-owned by Lowry.
The Lowry family bloodstock dealings include links with Coolmore Stud, which is owned by billionaire John Magnier and his family, and considered one of the top thoroughbred horse operations in the world.
The racehorse Ned In The Park, owned by Glebeland Farm Partnership, was sired by Walk In The Park, a stallion that heads the roster for national hunt stud services at Coolmore. Heading the roster means it is probably the most expensive stallion being offered for a particular category of horse. The stud price for Walk in the Park is only available on request, according to the Coolmore website, though media reports put it in the range of €20,000 to €25,000 per cover.
Walk In The Park was sired by Montjeu, which in turn was sired by Sadler’s Wells, both of which are famous sires. In 2025, Walk In The Park became the first stallion since 1948 to sire the winners of both the Cheltenham Gold Cup and the Aintree Grand National in the same season.
Future Prospect, a national hunt horse born in 2020 and currently owned by Susan Magnier and Brosnan Racing, was bought as a foal by JL Bloodstock for €31,000, according to the Coolmore website. It is not clear when the horse was sold by JL Bloodstock. It was sired by Order of St George, for which the current stud fee at Coolmore is €5,000. Order of St George is the offspring of a stallion sired by Sadler’s Wells.
Horses that race on the flat are more valuable than national hunt horses. In August of last year, a yearling bred by Glebeland Farm Partnership sold for €120,000 at Goffs. The yearling was sired by Wootton Bassett, a well-known flat-race horse brought to Coolmore in 2020. The stud fee charged by Coolmore rose steadily in the years after the stallion moved to Coolmore, starting at €100,000 and rising to €300,000 by 2025. The horse died unexpectedly of natural causes in September, 2025, when at the Magnier stud operation in Australia for the southern hemisphere covering season.
Much of the Moriarty tribunal’s inquiries into financial links between Lowry and O’Brien concerned land transactions in England in the late 1990s. Lowry still owns a 10 per cent interest in one of the properties investigated: 2.5 acres in Mansfield, according to his latest declaration of interests.
He is also the owner, in partnership with Tipperary businessman Liam Carroll, of 20 acres of land near Wigan, which currently has negligible value, but could increase in value if rezoned. The land was bought in 2001 using a UK company called Vineacre, which has since been dissolved. It was not part of the tribunal’s inquiries.
Last month, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions announced it would not be recommending that criminal charges be brought against Lowry arising from investigations by the Garda and Criminal Assets Bureau triggered by the tribunal findings.The announcement welcomed by both Lowry and O’Brien.
The tribunal’s findings had, according to Lowry, led to him being subjected to repeated insults, smears and false allegations.
The findings, he said, “deprived me of any ability to defend myself from repeated character assassination and attacks on my reputation”.
“I will be forever grateful to the people of Tipperary and North Kilkenny for the unwavering faith and trust they placed in me,” said Lowry.
He declined to be interviewed for this article.