By Sean O’Driscoll

U.S. ATTORNEY John McKay of Seattle, one of the fired U.S. attorneys at the center of the scandal involving Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, went to visit family in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary to get away from his political trouble with the attorney general’s office.

It turned out to be the trip that got him fired.

“Even when (McKay) is in Ireland he causes problems! He needs to stop writing letters,” wrote Michael Elston, the chief of staff of the deputy attorney general in Washington.

Elston sent his email, uncovered by a joint congressional hearing, to Gonzales’s White House liaison, Monica Goodling. It was the moment the attorney general’s office decided to get rid of McKay.

Emails show that the office waited two months after McKay returned from Ireland to fire him. He was one of eight US attorneys fired in what senior Democrats say was a concerted effort to purge prosecutors considered disloyal to the White House.

The reason for his firing was “shocking,” McKay says.

Last September, he and five of his siblings visited Tipperary, Kerry and Clare, and McKay had made some critical comments to a Seattle newspaper about budget cuts in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle.

Although the article did not identify that he was in Ireland that week, the attorney general’s office knew all about it.

“Any U.S. attorney who leaves the country has to register it with the Department of Justice. I guess there were some very small people in the attorney general’s office and they were monitoring pretty closely,” said McKay.

As soon as the article appeared in Seattle, the emails were flying.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse sent a copy of the article to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty with the words: “I happened to see this when I was traveling last week in the Northwest. These comments are not exactly helpful ... anything we can do?”

McKay says that he and his family now find it amusing that his trip to Ireland has been brought into the controversy, especially as it had such innocent motives.

His sister, Kathleen, had just graduated from theology college and his large Catholic family of 12 siblings wanted to celebrate in their grandparents’ homeland.

Six of them went on a week-long tour, staying most of the time in the Dingle Peninsula and going on a bike tour in Clare. They went to visit their Irish cousins, the Tierney family in Nenagh, but discovered they weren’t home that week.

Now teaching law at Seattle University, McKay came into work last week to find the words: “Even When He Is in Ireland…” written on the blackboard in his office.

“I’m getting a lot of ribbing about this,” he said.

“It’s the only amusing part of what is otherwise a very serious situation. The sad thing is that we expect the Department of Justice to protect us. Clearly they didn’t do that.”