Real IRA behind Players shooting
Ex-Provos are using shootings and pipe-bomb attacks to expand their drug-peddling and extortion rackets
GUN ATTACK: A forensics officer gathers evidence outside the Players Lounge on Fairview Strand, Dublin, where the doorman and two customers were shot last week
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Sunday August 01 2010
SO-CALLED "Real IRA" extortionists were behind last weekend's attack on the Players Lounge pub in Fairview in Dublin, which left the innocent doorman with critical head injuries and two innocent customers injured, one seriously.
The same dissident elements came close to causing multiple deaths in the North over the Orange Twelfth of July parading period when they attempted to set fire to the Dublin-Belfast train, with 55 passengers -- including women, children and the elderly -- trapped on board.
In Dublin, the group terming themselves the Real IRA have intimidated large numbers of publicans around Dublin into hiring their members as doormen. They have even muscled in on sporting clubs. They are simultaneously involved in extorting money from drug dealers and charging those whom they allow to sell drugs from the pubs where they control the doors.
The innocent doorman, shot twice in the body and once in the head at the Players Lounge on Fairview Strand last Sunday night, is in a critical condition in hospital. Wayne Barrett, 31, from Finglas, was described by friends and relatives last week as a "gentle giant" who had never had any connection with criminals or any republican group.
Equally innocent customers, friends Austen Purcell, 22, and Brian Masterson, 30, were also injured. Mr Purcell is described as "critical but stable" from gunshot wounds to his chest. Mr Masterson suffered two bullet wounds to his body but discharged himself midweek to be at the bedside of his friend in Beaumont Hospital.
Gardai say the "republicans" behind the extortion rackets in Dublin, Cork and elsewhere are led by ex-Provisional IRA members who had moved into racketeering well before the ceasefires of the mid-Nineties were called and the organisation declared itself disbanded in July 2005.
They are believed to have been responsible for dozens of pipe bomb attacks intended to force people into paying extortion demands in Dublin.
In Cork they shot dead convicted drug dealer Gerard Stanton, 41, at his home in Sarsfield Park on 21 January last. Gardai believe Stanton was shot dead because he refused to pay an extortion demand by the Real IRA.
After last Sunday night's attack in Dublin, the getaway car was found burning in a laneway off Mount Street in the south city centre.
Gardai are investigating possible links to the Real IRA group led by ex-Provos in the south inner city. This group was linked to the murder of James Curran, 42, who was shot dead in the Green Lizard pub in the Liberties in June 2006. Mr Curran had challenged the gang's leader after seeing him accept protection money from two members of a local drug gang.
Bernard Dempsey, who is now in the dissident republican wing in Portlaoise Prison, was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering Mr Curran. In the Eighties, Dempsey was a prominent member of the Sinn Fein-led Concerned Parents Against Drugs vigilante group, which had claimed to be trying to rid inner city areas of drug dealers.
He and his associates subsequently began taking protection money off certain drug dealers, while targeting and shooting others who refused to pay up.
This south inner city Dublin gang is now headed by a former close associate of Dempsey's and is also linked to another group active in Tallaght and surrounding areas.
Gardai say a further element of this organisation is active in north Dublin. One of the leading figures in this group is the chief suspect in the murder of yet another innocent Dublin man, Joe Rafferty, 28, who was shot dead outside his apartment in Ongar in west Dublin in April 2005.
Mr Rafferty, a father of one who had never been involved in crime, was murdered because he had spurned the advances of a middle-aged woman closely related to the "republican" gang leader. This woman initiated a series of incidents in which a relative of Mr Rafferty's was badly assaulted. Mr Rafferty confronted this man and struck him. That was regarded as sufficient reason for Mr Rafferty to be murdered.
The "dissident" republicans are now a purely criminal conspiracy, according to both police and mainstream republican sources. They are also heavily involved in extorting money from business people and drug dealers, as well as being linked to some of the big drugs gangs in Dublin and, gardai suspect, Cork.
In Dublin they have links to the south inner city gang run by the now Costa del Sol-based "Fat" Freddie Thompson. Members of Thompson's gang have close family links to the so-called dissidents.
Last December, gunmen who identified themselves as Real IRA burned down a warehouse owned by a businessman in Jonesboro, south Armagh, after demanding he pay them stg£25,000.
The man, who has been in the legitimate fuel business for years, had told the gun-men he did not have that kind of money.
With very limited policing in the south Armagh area because of the threat to Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) members' lives, it is believed that extortion by the dissidents is widespread.
Relatively little money from Real IRA racketeering and extortion goes towards promoting the "military" campaign in the North.
The Provisional IRA kept a very tight reign on so-called "fundraising". On one occasion in the early Nineties, when it discovered that funds were being siphoned off, three senior members of the Dublin "brigade" were abducted and taken to south Armagh, where they were tortured, then shot repeatedly in the arms and legs. One of these men was the brother of the former head of the IRA in Dublin.
The Real IRA and its associated group, the Continuity IRA, are both heavily involved in attempting to rekindle sectarian violence in Belfast during the Twelfth of July Orange marches.
Well-known Real IRA figures orchestrated large gangs of Catholic youths in west and north Belfast. More than 80 members of the PSNI were injured as they prevented a large mob from the Falls Road area invading the adjoining Protestant Village area.
In Ardoyne in north Belfast the Real IRA orchestrated three nights of rioting, hijacking and burning of vehicles and premises, and attacking the PSNI.
Two PSNI officers were injured by a sniper near North Queen Street station.
- Jim Cusack
Originally published in
