Fears for gardai as 'mini-Mafia' holds city to ransom
Tuesday November 30 2004
Michael Murray said the latest upsurge in violent crime in Limerick could not be dismissed as merely family feuds.
In reality, the city was facing an increasing level of organised crime that needs to be tackled, Mr Murray said.
"The authorities really haven't woken up to this, that there is this problem to be tackled. People who think this is not organised crime are living in cloud cuckoo land," the state solicitor added.
Interviewed for an RTE Prime Time programme, which investigated levels of crime in the city, he said: "We have in the embryonic stages a mini-Mafia growing up in the city - and we haven't looked at it in that light and haven't taken steps to fight it in that light."
In the wake of a crime wave that in the past 18 months has seen two gardai being shot at in the north of the city, Mr Murray told reporter Rita O'Reilly: "The gardai are continuously being intimidated and threatened. There is a real fear that a garda is going to be shot."
The offices of Mr Murray have twice been the target of arson attacks - the first incident occurred nine years ago when his O'Connell Street offices suffered huge damage in the fire.
No one was charged in connection with that attack but the chief suspect is also understood to have been behind a second attack last autumn on the home in the city of the chief state prosecutor, John O'Sullivan.
Three years after the first attack, Mr Murray's office was the subject of another attack, this time by a different group who were later prosecuted and convicted for the offence.
In addition to the arson attacks, Mr Murray is also understood to have been followed by known city criminals and had the tyres on his car slashed.
The programme, while not identifying any one individual, did suggest a single unnamed drugs gangland figure was manipulating criminal rivalries in the city for his own ends.
It also looked at the case of nightclub security guard Brian Fitzgerald, who was shot dead outside his home in Corbally, Limerick in November 2002.
Mr Fitzgerald, who was head of security at Doc's nightclub in the city, is understood to have been killed because he refused to allow a drugs gang operate inside the city club.
Although no prosecutions were ever brought in the case, the programme last night said that an informant had come forward who was willing to give evidence against those responsible.
- Eugene Moloney
