Limerick, August 2026. The alarm wakes me at 6.15 and it's time to get ready for work. Clean work clothes are laid out and my bag and boots are by the door. I make my tea and look round the bedsit as I try to wake up. It's clean and tidy, ready for an evening of writing and study when I come home and my new ukulele is waiting for me with clean new strings. The walls are lined with exercise programme instructions from the neuromuscular therapist, there are souveniers on the cupboards, Leinster House, UL, events. Things are so different from two years ago, and so much has happened, one thing that reminds me of the penthouse is the floor, the same brown bare floor, the other thing is Michael and his associates still showing off in the press - I can't understand the psychology of a man who behaves like that after nearly killing me and doing goodness knows what to others. I make the bed, pack my lunch, check I've got everything, put my headphones on for 'The Belfast Polka' - my walking and getting started music, and I'm off.
***
He was so vague I never understood what was going on, and he seemed unaware that this knife edge was harmful to my emotions and the emotions of my friends and supporters.
He'd initially told me I could stay a week, then he was talking as if I was staying longer and I questioned him on this and he told me he didn't know how long I could stay but tickets to the match had sold out so he wouldn't be staying in the apartment and he didn't know what was happening with the person who was buying the place, so I should just stay put for now.
He would email every day and seemed concerned when he didn't email for two days and I didn't email him. He then started sending something daily and this something is where red flags started. At first I thought it was an Evangelical circular and I completely ignored it. Soon he was asking what I thought of what he was sending, I was too polite to say 'Utter crap', so I had a look at it and realised it had no religious message, but it was head messing. It was supposed to be mindfulness, but it was more like an encouragement to be self-indulgent and excuse yourself if you did things wrong or hurt people. The last thing someone like myself needs. I was polite but didn't engage with it. He continued to send it for weeks and was expecting me to sign up to it. It's well wrapped up as warm and human but with no humanity in it, the same as my experience of cults. If he's been committing misconduct with boys and vulnerable people then it's hardly surprising he needs something like that to distance himself from responsibility.
His strange psychology, propped with this daily programme, began to emerge. He would send emails with greetings such as 'Happy Friday!' which seemed odd for an older Irish man, it's more suited to young American professionals. But increasingly I was seeing his use of bad popular psychology, things got more concerning when he told me I was 'self-critical' and added that this was 'Very Dangerous' to push this daily programme on me, apparently being self -critical was banned. I wrote him an essay, which I still have, on self-criticism and self-regulation. Unfortunately he seems to have been used to a passive and easily fed audience among his vulnerable mentees. He also used a lot of flattery, praising my email writing and all sorts. He was used to using this stuff to control and keep people but he didn't consider himself to be my friend and I wasn't sure what he was. I know what friends are, John, Lisa, Lorna and others were friends, whatever Michael was, he wasn't a friend and he wanted my very private data and he wanted to be in control.
I used the money he gave me to buy new boots without holes, and I was able to get a haircut and get the months of matted hair taken off. My hair doesn't grow long, it grows thicker and thicker and should be thinned every 6 weeks, but in poverty and in Ireland, I can rarely get a haircut. I felt better for haircut, and boots which protected my feet after months of wet and cut feet. I was truly grateful to the man, I barely knew him but was already putting him on a pedestal and ignoring the red flags such as the determined effort to gather my very personal information.
Lisa was texting every day to ask what was happening and what he was doing. She was quite concerned, and we arranged set times to meet and talk at our favourite cafe. Lisa was sharper than I was, but I was weary from my illness and prolonged street homelessness and the things I'd experienced, which I had been repressing in order to survive. I never wanted Lisa worried as she is very vulnerable and much more disabled than me. Lisa did worry, every day that Michael was in my life, she knew better than me and I feel very bad that I didn't understand, didn't listen more carefully to her, and allowed Michael to do as he did - although I did walk out on him with nowhere to go after just 3 weeks - he persuaded me to come back though, and it's one of my biggest errors.
It was 10 days or so after he'd put me in the penthouse and left things uncertain, that he came to meet me again. It was a Tuesday and I found as time went on, he had a strange thing about Tuesdays. I still do not know what, just that he does and it's one of his strange algorithms, he is very fixated on dates, times and anniversaries. I looked up why Tuesdays might be significant, and this is all I found:
- Peak Output: Office data shows workers have higher energy and focus on Tuesdays after recovering from Monday.
- Inspiration: Psychological studies indicate people feel more creative spark on Tuesdays than on flexible days like Fridays.
- Best for Business: Job postings and professional meetings get higher engagement on Tuesdays than any other day.
He told me he'd come and meet me at the apartment and we'd go for a meal. Then he told me he'd meet me outside, it was all a bit vague and I wasn't quite sure what was happening. In the end I went down to wait for him on the bench outside the apartment block, anxious, nervous, because he could decide not to help me now, even though he'd been talking about my future, and had asked if I'd move to Limerick.
He came round the corner and when he saw me he looked kind of disappointed just briefly, and I felt ashamed, I was overweight, my clothes were ragged, I think he'd forgotten what I looked like or maybe hoped I'd scrub up better off the streets. We'd been speaking by email and text every day but now he was here, my hero.
He told me he'd been around for some time, sitting over in the conservatory at the front of the hotel, and his things were over there. He took me over to the hotel. He said something about the weather, and I said 'It rains in Limerick every day, doesn't it?' He replied seriously 'Not every day' not realising I was joking and doing a Frank McCourt. He was a solemn man, never had much of a sense of humour, and joking with him didn't work, which was a culture shock because myself and my friends tend to laugh and joke a lot. I don't recall any time I made him laugh nor any time he said anything which made me laugh.
At the hotel he asked what I wanted to drink. I had to work with him to get his understanding that I didn't drink alcohol, not even on an occasion such as this. I have nothing against alcohol and on occasions I've had a small drink of wine or in France, a fresh cider when I worked on the cider farm, but homeless, in poverty and vulnerable, alcohol is an absolute no. The level of trauma I suffer would make alcoholism an easy choice, but I have no real taste for the stuff, which makes it easy to abstain, and if the man takes in vulnerable people, he shouldn't encourage them to drink. So I had soft drinks. He had obviously already had a drink or two but wasn't drunk, and he had some sort of spirits that I had never heard of, I don't know much about drinks. He was trying to get me to order and I wasn't used to eating out, so I had to ask him, and he got us some BBQ chicken wings as a shared starter, which was nice.
He was telling me about himself and his wife being teachers, there was a lot that didn't add up, for example their ages compared to when he said they married, and he said they lived in the penthouse where he was keeping me, but he's owned his current home a lot longer than the penthouse, everything about him was bewildering. He told me he wasn't helping me because he was a good person, I was puzzled, and he added that he wasn't a bad person either, he hoped. His way of saying things was strange. He said 'Everyone deserves a second chance'. Even that sounded odd. He wanted me to move to Limerick, he said 'It might change your life' and this became part of a mantra he repeated often, the same as his 'You've got my number in your phone now', he told me he reminded all of his mentees of this to tell them they were better off now with him in their lives, but again it was odd. It seemed almost arrogant, as if he was the source of all help, and yet he knew I couldn't phone him.
He talked a lot, but mainly not to me, and this was how things were throughout the time I knew him. He was on the phone all the time, talking to people, and a lot of it seemed trivial, he phoned, he texted, he emailed, all the time, I was an afterthought. It was strange. It made it hard for me as I still have a slight communication disorder and if someone isn't listening to me or talking to me, I feel discouraged.
When he had time to talk to me he told me he wanted to put me in an apartment in Limerick with a man. I immediately baulked. Being apartment match-made with a man, a stranger, didn't seem like a good way to head at all. He launched into a speech about how people didn't always have the perfect home first time, they have to do a few moves and how he'd not had the perfect home for a long time. But I stood my ground and told him that I wasn't sure about being put with a strange male and was there a lock on the bedroom door and who was this man?
His answer was strange, and became part of the very strangeness of him and this whole relationship. He said 'Put it this way, I own a number of apartments in the block, and this man goes round turning off the lights and electrical sockets in the communal areas, so he saves me money'. Keep in mind that Michael tried without grounds, to make me out to be less than sane when he came after me in October 2024, his behavior and the things he said were not entirely normal.
This answer he gave is obviously not related to a vulnerable woman querying how she will be safe in a situation with a strange man. He then wanted to arrange for me to come to Limerick on the Tuesday the following week. He was surprised that I knew the Green Bus and Annacotty and asked how, and I told him I'd been house sitting in Limerick and Clare and I was collected off the Green Bus from Annacotty for house sitting. He was really surprised and then asked who I had house sat for and if he could have their details, again too intrusive, he wanted my references and so on, but this felt like a violation and I wouldn't give him information except the house sitters web page with my details and testimonials. I had even house-sat a number of times while street homeless and because I'm clean and responsible, no one had ever known and it gave me a break from the streets.
He sent me to put money on my leap card and he told me he'd book the tickets for the trip to Limerick the next week. There was some confusion for days as he said he'd book, he then thought I was booking, he was then booking and then he thought I was booking. It was always a bit like this. He appeared to live in a fog of confusion which had a sharp contrast to his large business empire of properties and very fast pace of life, just as his spelling and grammar seemed at odds with his teaching history.
He sent me a 'schedule' for my visit to Limerick and I was taken aback, he was trying to fit a large amount of things into just a few hours. He wanted me to arrive on the unreliable green bus and then we'd go through this huge schedule in a few hours before he flew to the UK where he had an apartment in London where he'd stay, as he was preparing it for a new tenant or something along those lines. By now I was a little puzzled as to where his wife was in all this as he was always alone in his ventures. But I remember with the crazy schedule he'd written 'Welcome to my world' about the amount he was making us do in a few hours. His world is his, I am autistic and suffering trauma and cannot be put under pressure, it's not good for me, as this whole matter proved.
Here is a little bit about the tenancies he then subsequently involves me in:
https://thestorybehindlifeforce198.blogspot.com/p/michael-and-tenancies-part-of-puzzle.html
Here is post 5 on the blog:
https://thestorybehindlifeforce198.blogspot.com/2026/08/post-5-struggle-for-life.html
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