Dublin gang wars: council advises estate residents to move out for safety
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Version 2 of 6. As Ireland’s two major gangs square up to each other for potentially the biggest crime war in the Republic’s history, the Guardian has learned that the city council has been told to advise families linked to one of the factions to move out of their homes. The warning centres on the Oliver Bond flats complex in the south inner city as fears build that a north Dublin-based gang is about to strike back over Monday night’s murder of Eddie Hutch Senior. He was the brother of Gerry “The Monk” Hutch. Associates of the Hutch family have been linked with the audacious fatal gun attack at the Regency hotel last Friday during a weigh-in for a boxing bout in which David Byrne was killed. The Gardai have set up armed checkpoints across the city and are now so concerned about a revenge attack that they approached the city council to pass on advice to some of the tenants in the flats that they might be targets. One council source told the Guardian: “Even if they are related through marriage or they happen to be in some way associated with the rival south-side gang then they are now targets, too. Eddie Hutch wasn’t a major player. And the same goes for anyone connected, either through working as a courier for the other gang, or even being a friend of them – they are now targets.” On Tuesday morning, the area around the previous night’s shooting – Poplar Row in the Ballybough district of north inner-city Dublin – was sealed off, with a large Garda presence. At the house where Eddie Hutch was shot nine times by his attackers, the shattered glass door where the killers burst in remained exposed while armed officers patrolled the streets around. Eddie Hutch was selected in revenge for the killing of Byrne, a “soldier” loyal to Christy Kinahan, an Irish gangster living on the Costa del Sol who runs a multi-million euro drugs empire from southern Spain and whose Dublin-based lieutenants are mainly based on the southside of the Liffey river. Eddie Hutch, a father of five in his 50s, was gunned down in front of family members at about 7.45pm on Monday night, even while the Gardai were erecting further checkpoints on routes into areas where the two crime gangs have their bases. Christy Burke, a local independent republican councillor and former lord mayor of Dublin, expressed the frustration of local people over the widespread perception that, despite their patrols, the Irish police cannot counter the threat from heavily armed, ruthless and well financed crime gangs. “The gardai have lost it, in my opinion. They don’t have the resources they need and ordinary citizens need protecting. There were armed checkpoints around the city last night and all weekend, and still this happened,” Burke said. South of the Liffey, there is a feeling of resignation that Hutch’s associates will soon hit back in similar fashion. Councillor Mannix Flynn described his native Dublin on Tuesday evening as a “city under siege where a great evil is amongst us”. Flynn said the eruption of the north-south Dublin gangland war had been inevitable because the Irish state and society had tolerated the existence of the gangs and the drugs trade for so long. “Firstly, I blame the glamorisation of these criminal gangs, the way they are given nicknames in the media and are portrayed as celebrities. This has created a culture of admiration among young working-class men in particular who, wrongly, look up to these gangland figures as heroes. “Second, the Dublin middle classes are to blame, especially those who snort their cocaine in their nightclubs, their golf clubs, their rugby clubs or at home among their friends. They are bigger consumers of drugs than the working class and the real ones fuelling the wealth of these career criminals, enriching these gangs. “Overall there has been far too much tolerance of these gangs, even while the state was closing Garda stations across the country and in Dublin. If the minister for justice [Frances Fitzgerald] is serious about restoring people’s faith in law and order, she should reopen some of those Dublin stations.” Fitzgerald has now revealed that a permanent armed garda unit will be established to tackle gangland crime. The justice minister also took the unprecedented step on Tuesday of making a direct appeal to individual members of the two warring crime gangs, urging those of them who fear for their safety to go to the Garda. Since Friday’s attack killed David Byrne at the weigh-in on Friday, there have been calls for mediation between the two sides. Even the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has been called on to offer himself as a gobetween to help stop further bloodshed. But while Martin issued his own appeal to the “mothers and grandfathers” of those within the gangs to urge an end to the feuding, he said he had no intention of becoming a mediator for “mafioso gangsters”, saying “the only people who will get through at this stage … are the people from within their own ranks”. |