Dublin gang wars: council advises estate residents to move out for safety
Warning centres on south-side estate, as checkpoints do little to assuage public fears that police cannot prevent further killings
Armed officers patrol north Dublin on Tuesday. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
Gardai at the scene of Monday night’s murder of Eddie Hutch Senior. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA
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 toChristy 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.
