Cathal McCarthy has aged well in the past 13 years, despite what he has been through.
In 2012 the father of three had faced down Limerick’s most violent criminals and withstood threats to burn down his family home.
McCarthy, now 55, still lives at number 5 Weston Gardens, a terrace of nine homes overlooking Hyde Road, the heartland of organised crime in Limerick.
But his fears have returned over the return to violence in this part of Limerick city.
In 2012 he had survived a decade of threats from criminal gangs. He had moved into Weston Gardens in 2001, and within 18 months, his neighbours – in houses one, two, and three – had been burned out.
Local associates of the Dundon crime family, who moved from England to Limerick in 1999, offered a simple choice: €20,000 cash to sign over the deeds or they would set fire to your home.
McCarthy and a neighbour at number four faced regular threats but they refused to leave, even as teenagers acting for local criminals stripped neighbouring burnt-out houses of copper and then used the husked homes as drug dens. After threats at knifepoint, that neighbour eventually left.
McCarthy, who was studying for a master’s in sociology at the University of Limerick, refused, even when six men kicked down his front door in 2004.
Much has happened since then to end the gangland violence that plagued Limerick for more than 20 years – but much has failed to happen, leading to a new wave of violence, in the view of the local community.
The Government promised €1.6 billion to regenerate four crime-ridden Limerick estates. It funded 100 new gardaí. But the 2008 economic crash curtailed spending by the State. When the regeneration programme ended in 2012, only €116 million had been spent, less than 10 per cent of what was promised.
The fight against specific criminals was more successful.
In 2012 two of Limerick’s most infamous criminals, brothers Wayne and John Dundon, were imprisoned by the Special Criminal Court for threatening to kill three members of their rivals, the Collins family, neighbours of theirs on Hyde Road.
Cathal McCarthy hoped the implosion of the Dundon gang would present an opportunity to reclaim Hyde Road, an estate that had been lost to crime for 40 years. Now that hope seems forlorn.
This week, Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan, on a visit to Limerick, promised gardaí in Limerick the resources they need to quell three new violent feuds in the city and county.
People in Limerick thought they had seen the back of violence following the end of the feud between the McCarthy-Dundon, the Keane-Collopy and the Ryan gangs that gripped Limerick in the 1990s and 2000s – which cost the lives of 20 people.
But gangland violence has re-emerged and Hyde Road has, once again, become a flashpoint with a fresh round of violent tit-for-tat attacks.
Thirteen years after testifying against the Dundons, April Collins – the daughter of their one-time-partner-turned-rival – remains their prime target, especially since she moved to Hyde Road in 2023.
She is now married to Thomas O’Neill, who was convicted of a 2004 gang rape of a woman in Cratloe Woods in Co Clare.
O’Neill, who is currently serving two years in prison for drug dealing, is a leading figure in the Collins drugs gang, whose members are being targeted by the McCarthy-Dundons.
Since April Collins’s return to Hyde Road, there has been a series of gun, petrol and pipe bomb attacks on homes linked to the Collins gang.
While intensive policing in areas controlled by the crime gangs and the imprisonment of leading criminal players helped to end the feud, underlying social problems were not fixed.
In Cathal McCarthy’s view, the State failed to act and now, the next generation of the rival criminal factions is in place.
Gardaí have a dossier with details and photos of eight named children aged 12-16, who, it is claimed, are foot soldiers for the Hyde Road gangs.
Four of the eight have already received antisocial behaviour orders.
These children together with a then 11-year-old boy, the son of a local heroin dealer, attacked a local shop owner while armed with wooden posts two years ago.
Within weeks of that assault, which was captured on CCTV, a local pensioner was forced to use an iron bar to defend himself after being surrounded by these youths, one of whom, the 11-year-old, was carrying a taser.
“This 11-year-old is notorious. He is now 13 and he’s huge; he’s really sprung up of late. He will be the next Wayne Dundon,” says McCarthy.
In October 2023, shots were fired at the home of Jimmy Collins, the father of April and one-time partner of Wayne Dundon’s until his daughter April turned State witness against the Dundons.
Arson attacks on cars and houses on the Hyde Road continued throughout the next 12 months, prompting Limerick’s most senior police officer, Chief Supt Derek Smart, to warn in October 2024 that people would be killed.
“They are not random attacks – they are very targeted in what they are trying to achieve,” he said.
More shots were fired at a Collins-owned home on the Hyde Road in November 2024, and in two separate attacks in January 2025. Since then, there have been a dozen violent incidents, including pipe and petrol bomb attacks.
The Garda Emergency Response Unit now conducts nightly armed checkpoints in flashpoint areas. The gangs appear undeterred.
In February, a lone attacker was caught on CCTV throwing a pipe bomb over a wall into the rear of Jimmy Collins’s home. It exploded but caused no injuries.
Between February and April, the Cork-based bomb disposal unit was deployed on multiple occasions to deal with pipe bombs seized in Limerick’s criminal strongholds.
In April, more than 100 gardaí conducted 17 searches at properties in Ballinacurra Weston, Southill and in Co Clare, seizing cash and designer items worth more than €235,000.
Then, in the early hours of May 8th, two masked men in a stolen Audi staged a drive-by shooting, firing nine shots indiscriminately at houses on the Hyde Road, including at April Collins’s home.
The people carrying out the attacks are proud of their work: they posted videos of these attacks on WhatsApp groups.
The footage of the drive-by shooting is particularly chilling. A passenger in a stolen Audi car films the masked driver, wearing blue latex gloves and holding what appears to be a Glock pistol in his right hand. The driver lowers his window and fires nine shots as he drives past April Collins’s house on Hyde Road.
“He’s just firing away at any house. They say they were targeting April Collins, but it’s a miracle no one was killed or injured,” says McCarthy.
Despite the Minister promising to resource Limerick gardaí with whatever they need, McCarthy points out basic policing resources have been cut.
There used to be 20 community police in the area; now there are 10. Limerick county no longer has a dedicated drugs unit, despite recent violent drug disputes in Kilmallock and Rathkeale.
Local politicians are acutely aware of the risks and concerns over increasing gangland attacks in the Hyde Road area.
“The atmosphere there is very tense; it’s not how people want to live their lives,” says veteran Fianna Fáil TD for Limerick City Willie O’Dea, who has been asked in the past to mediate between rival gangs.
“The vast majority just want the violence to end.”
Fr Richard Keane, who took over as parish priest in Our Lady of Lourdes Parish Church on the edge of Hyde Road last September, said the increasing feud violence was forcing parents to remove schoolchildren from the local Our Lady of Lourdes National School “to avoid the conflict and flashpoints”.
“The vast majority of people here want to live in peace,” he says. “This feud has had a big effect, even on the local school where certain parents will take their kids to another school because they want to avoid each other. It’s a shame. The school struggles because of it. Only for the foreign children from Africa and India the school would struggle.”
Detectives believe the attacks on the Collins family are being perpetrated by associates of local criminals the O’Donoghues, who rent a house from Limerick City Council on Hyde Road. Several of the O’Donoghues have been named in court proceedings as participants in organised crime.
One brother, Aaron O’Donoghue (25) was described in court proceedings as the “main instigator” of the violence on Hyde Road since 2023.
Det Eoin Dillon told Limerick District Court that O’Donoghue was “actively involved” in the feud in the Hyde Road area and remained a “serious and active threat, including loss of life, to homeowners in the area”.
The O’Donoghues are considered proxies for the Dundon gang as they are cousins of the infamous McCarthy crime family, one part of the McCarthy-Dundon organisation.
With the Dundons decimated, the McCarthy faction, now headed up by brothers Edward “Eds” McCarthy and “Fat John” McCarthy, is now the dominant force, considered among Ireland’s most violent gangs.
Locals such as Cathal McCarthy continue to lobby for more CCTV, policing and security fencing to protect law-abiding citizens.
Those measures have worked in Weston Gardens, where McCarthy’s neighbouring burned out houses have since been refurbished, and one recently sold for €145,000.
It’s still a case of buyer beware – two minutes away on Hyde Road, up to 25 heroin addicts gather daily to buy from the next generation of Hyde Road dealers.
