Gang war is a family busi ness in Limerick city
Sunday February 02 2003
THE violence in Limerick last week has dimensions of both a neighbourhood feud mixed with the effects of international drug dealing and the drift of ex-republicans into domestic organised crime.
Despite the fact that Limerick has a population of just around 100,000, it has an abnormally high number of homicides and has the highest number of gardai per head of population of any urban area in Ireland. What's more, the serious violence in the city is mainly confined to only the small areas of Ballyeely and Ballynanty, covering little more than a few hundred acres, to the north of the city. Only 10,000-15,000 people less than a fifth of the city's population live in the area concerned, between 'The Island' and Moyross. Willie O'Dea's observation last week that the vast majority of people in Limerick know nothing about the people involved in this violence in absolutely correct. The violence does not impinge on the normal life of the city.
Outside areas like Ballynanty and Kileely, where the two families at the centre of last week's events live, the rest of Limerick, including the sprawling estates of Southill, has average-to-low crime figures. The riverfront has been transformed beyond recognition in recent years, with banks of apartment buildings and the gleaming landmark Clarion Hotel declaiming the physical manifestation of the 21st century Ireland's rise to prosperity.
This rise to prosperity is, to an extent, also behind what has been going on in Limerick recently. The north side gangs have made more money than they could ever have imagined, supplying soft drugs to the youth the Celtic Tiger's cubs in the west of Ireland.
Only a decade or so ago, there were meagre profits from drugs in the west. The hippies tended to have their own channels and even grew their own grass. The students and working class kids had no money. And, besides, hauling hash in bulk across the country from the suppliers in Dublin or Cork was always risky.
Ecstasy and economic recovery changed that; E is less bulky and provides greater profits. Former republicans and some Dublin criminals established connections with Dutch drugs dealers and began sending ecstasy here in large quantities. The growth in nightclubs and pubs where E could be sold created a whole new economy for the north side criminals in Limerick. Lately, the addition of cocaine to the popular recreational pharmacopoeia has boosted profits yet again.
The primary drug-trafficking gang that emerged in the early Nineties included Kieran Keane, who was shot dead on Wednesday night, and his former associate and later enemy, Eddie Ryan, the father of the two kidnapped youths, who was himself shot dead in the Moose Pub in Cathedral Street in November 2000.
Keane, Ryan and members of two other affiliated families had a highly profitable alliance up until about five years ago when Ryan broke away and took his own road.
The break-up was reputedly traced back to a fight between two teenage girls from each family which resulted in one having her ear bitten off. The following day the other girl was waylaid by female relatives of the first girl, held down and had the initial 'S' carved on her face with a Stanley knife.
This quickly escalated into a vicious stand-off. Families started bringing their children to school in convoys, accompanied by armed men. Within days of the girls' fight, one of the men, sitting in a car outside a primary school, was approached by a man who put a gun to his neck and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed and the man ran off.
Within a few weeks of that incident, there were up to a dozen attacks, including shootings. A booby-trap bomb, made by ex-members of the IRA or INLA, was placed under one man's car and another booby-trap attached to a door at another man's house.
The outbreak of the Ryan-Keane feud culminated in the murder of 40-year-old Eddie Ryan, father of Kieran and Eddie junior. Ryan senior was shot dead by two gunmen as he was at a post-funeral party in the Moose pub. One of the gunmen was Kieran Keane, also 40, who was shot dead on Thursday night.
Gardai say that although the ostensible reason for the feud was the fight between the two girls, there were already growing tensions among the gang over the division of the drug profits. When Ryan left, he took with him about 20 men all with considerable reputations for toughness.
The two other families who had constituted the rest of the original gang with Keane and Ryan stayed with Kieran Keane, giving them a core strength of about 50. Eddie Ryan's gang made up for lack of numbers in ruthlessness and the feud had rumbled on since.
There is a third gang-alliance in the north side made up of a local family and another family whose members are mainly settled Travellers. Members of this group have been involved in intermittent violence, sometimes associated with the Keane-Ryan struggle. Eddie Ryan shot dead a member of this gang, Michael McCarthy, at his caravan off Clare Street in 1993 but escaped prosecution.
Both Eddie Ryan and Kieran Keane's gangs maintained separate contacts with drug suppliers in Britain, mainly in the Midlands and Manchester. These links had been established years earlier and involve members of the Travelling community who had roots in the Limerick and Galway areas.
A Travelling family associated with the late Eddie Ryan are regarded by gardai as being very well organised, massively wealthy from drug-smuggling and may even have control of large chunks of the drugs trade in parts of the Midlands of England. Several years ago, this family laid down links with some of the major Dutch drug wholesalers in Rotterdam.
This travelling family was the first group in Ireland outside the terrorist organisations to use assault rifles. They were used in an attack on a house in Mountbellew, Galway, two years ago. The AK47s that have emerged in Limerick in the past 18 months may well have come from this connection.
Gardai are aware, however, that the Limerick gangs have close contacts with former IRA members who would also be in a position to supply weapons from IRA dumps. The former IRA people in the area are now mainly allied to the Continuity IRA, which has established a power base in the city and is now expanding in other areas, including the North.
The republicans who remained loyal to the Provisional IRA in Munster have stayed well away from the trouble in Limerick but continue to train and keep active.
The latest twist in the Limerick 'killing fields' saga, as one local man referred to it last week, is believed to have stemmed from the emergence of a fourth force in the north side. This is a gang based around the nucleus of a notorious family in the Moyross area.
This gang is believed responsible for murdering the 34-year-old doorman Brian Fitzgerald, who was gunned down just outside his home in Corbally on November 29. Mr Fitzgerald had taken a stand against the gangs trying to push drugs into the club where he worked. He paid with his life.
The same gang also gunned down Sean Poland, 39, at his home in Blackwater, Co Clare, on New Year's Eve, stepping over his body lying in the front hall and subjecting his girlfriend to two hours of terror until they left with a few thousand pounds in cash which Mr Poland had made through car-dealing.
Gardai in Limerick say this gang has an appalling history of violence, but until the last few years had not become involved in serious organised crime and drug-dealing. Their previous history tended to involve armed robbery and aggravated burglary. They specialised in breaking into the homes of elderly farmers in the Munster area, terrorising elderly people into handing over their savings.
One member of the gang is serving a life term for murdering an elderly farmer who was beaten, then hung upside down in his home and left to die. The ferocity of this Moyross family is injecting a new impetus into the already vicious brew in the north side gangland violence. At the start of this year gardai were already predicting that the emergence of this gang would lead to grave problems in the Munster area.
The Moyross gang is not known to have any major British or foreign drug suppliers but instead its members appear to be acting as enforcers for a very well organised gang from west Clare. This gang has been heavily involved in the smuggling business for years. It is believed it has brought counterfeit goods, including designer clothes, into Ireland by the shipload. It is also known to have handled very large consignments of drugs, and one member is serving a jail term for possession of a large haul of cannabis.
The west Clare mob has maritime links, and is believed to have been the local point of contact for at least one major British drug-smuggler who used the west coast to land large shipments of cannabis in the Eighties and Nineties. Since this British criminal left Ireland after one of his shipments was intercepted, and he finally came to the attention of the Criminal Assets Bureau the west Clare group has flourished in its own right.
IMPORTANTLY, the west Clare gang has known contacts with ex-IRA figures near the border who have moved in a major way into the handling and smuggling of counterfeit goods, cigarettes and illicit alcohol. These ex-republicans are emerging as the most energetic and efficient criminals in Ireland, employing skills they learned during their time with the IRA. They also appear to have a mutually respectful relationship with senior IRA figures and are believed to be paying protection to the IRA to be allowed to continue their work unhindered.
Senior gardai say that the major factors affecting crime in Ireland are the establishment of ex-paramilitaries in organised crime; the ease of moving drugs between states in Europe since the abolition of internal EU borders; and the introduction of the common currency which has made movement of money a great deal easier and safer. The 'micro' problems in Limerick are that the north side gangs are still producing vicious young criminals who are unafraid of the Garda and the law; the instilling of terror in witnesses who know they face being murdered if they testify in court; the replacement of knives as the traditional weapon of choice in Limerick with handguns, and now automatic weapons; and the recurrent feuding witnessed last week.
Experienced gardai say they see no quick fix. The arrival of the 20 armed members of the Emergency Response Unit is seen locally as a purely cosmetic exercise they are not suited for patrolling operations and will be reassigned to other duties in the coming weeks. Garda overtime in Limerick, as elsewhere, has been drastically cut as the force's auditors prepare for the overtime allocation in its budget for next year's EU Presidency.
A senior local officer predicted there will be retribution for the murder of Kieran Keane and this could precipitate even bloodier scenes than before. The talk on the north side is that the next time the feuding flares up, it will not be settled with handguns in pubs or lonely lanes but with AK47 attacks on homes or pubs.
- Jim Cusack
