Controversial Lifestyle Guru Moves Into UK
Sunday Tribune, Richard Oakley
The self-styled Irish lifestyle guru Tony Quinn is gaining widespread popularity in the UK despite ongoing doubts about his controversial organisation.
The multi-millionaire lost some of his supporters in Ireland when questions were raised about his teachings and qualifications. However, he has recently set up a base in London, where new recruits are paying £12,000 (over €18,000) each to go on Quinn's seminars, usually held in foreign destinations.
The Sunday Tribune understands that at least 50 people recently attended a seminar in Santa Monica, USA.
Quinn's group is recruiting people already involved in lifestyle organisations. One organisation, set up to promote the teaching of a US lifestyle guru, has said that a large number of its members have become involved in Quinn's organisation.
A hypnotist who describes himself as a doctor of clinical hypnotherapy, Quinn has been a controversial figure in Ireland since appearing on The Late Late Show a number of years ago to talk about his life system, but he is not well-known in the UK.
His organisation has operated for years in Ireland, running seminars and other profit-making, lifestyle-based business ventures which have allowed Quinn, who lives in the Bahamas, to amass millions. At one stage, he is understood to have been earning over €1m a month.
In 2001, following a number of concerns raised by members of the public, whose family members have come in contact with his organisaton, The Sunday Tribune investigated Quinn's activities. The investigation showed that a significant amount of time at Quinn's seminars was taken up by him telling those attending that his life system would work best for them if they managed to sell it to others.
Attendees were given tapes with a recording of this part of the seminar to take home and were told to listen to it every day. A copy of the tape was obtained by this newspaper and an independent hypnotist said that the people who could be heard crying out and applauding as Quinn spoke, were in a relaxed state and under Quinn's influence.
A number of leading academics then examined Quinn's lifestyle philosophy, called Educo, and other aspects of his teachings. Professor Ciaran Benson, head of the psychology department at University College Dubln, said the system was "simplistic in the extreme and without any acceptable research". He said Quinn's teachings were based on a "banal and superficial understanding of psychology of other other human beings".
Quinn says that people use only 10% of their minds and that he can teach them how to tap into the unconscious. He claims that if people want something, all they need to do is believe that they have it without any inner doubt and that it will "come about".
Quinn's postal request system was also examined, and dismissed by Professor Ian Robertson, director of Trinity College's Institute of Neuroscience. Quinn claims that if a person sends him a written request for what they want, along with a cheque, he will apply his mind to it and it will happen. However Robertson said there was no way the human mind could work in such a way.
If was also shown that Quinn's hypnotherapy qualification could be obtained in two years through correspondence with a US college, whilst another college, at which Quinn claims to have carried out groundbreaking research, said that this was his, and not its, interpretation of the significance of his work.
