Nathan McDonnell left with suspected broken jaw after altercation with gangland prisoner

Nathan McDonnell pleaded guilty at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin to drug importation into the Port of Cork and to assisting or facilitating a criminal gang to import crystal meth. File Picture: Domnick Walsh

The businessman convicted of facilitating Ireland’s biggest ever haul of crystal meth suffered a suspected broken jaw after falling foul of a hardened criminal in prison.

It’s understood that Nathan McDonnell, the 44-year-old former garden centre owner in Tralee, became involved in an altercation with Glen Thompson, a well-known gangland prisoner, at Portlaoise Prison in the Midlands.

McDonnell and Thompson are among six men who share a landing with each other in the prison’s A block, and are free to mingle with each other when not locked down.

It is unclear what circumstances led to the assault. A prison source indicated the two men had simply “stepped on each other’s toes” after having lived in close proximity to each other for some time.

“It’s a small landing, a small group, it can easily happen,” the source said.

Nathan McDonnell is currently awaiting sentencing for his role in the importation of more than €33m in crystal meth from Mexico in October 2023.

McDonnell pleaded guilty last October at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin to drug importation into the Port of Cork and to assisting or facilitating a criminal gang to import crystal meth.

Drugs uncovered

Some 546kg of the drug was found concealed in an industrial machine bound for export to Australia on February 15, 2024, with gardaí and Revenue officials discovering the consignment during a search of a shipping container at the Port of Cork in Ringaskiddy.

The businessman had formerly accumulated a net worth of between €4m and €5m from the 11 companies he was involved in, but had encountered money problems leaving him in a precarious position financially prior to his involvement in the drugs plot.

The crystal meth itself had been connected to the infamous Mexican Sinaloa cartel, the largest drug trafficking organisation in the world.

McDonnell had previously admitted to gardaí that he had stored the machine at Ballyseedy Garden Centre, adding that he was paid €150,000 to do so.

Glen Thompson, a 29-year-old hitman affiliated with the Kinahan drugs cartel, is currently serving a 12-and-a-half-year sentence handed down in July 2019 for his role, along with his brother Gary, in a failed attempt on the life of Patsy Hutch — the 63-year-old brother of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch — in March 2018.

A spokesperson for the prison service said that it “does not comment on individual prisoner cases or security or operational matters”.