When gardaí burst into a house on the Moneymore estate in Drogheda, Co Louth, to rescue Aaron Rochford, the 22-year-old was already in a grave condition.
Earlier that night – November 11th, 2018 – he had been abducted off the street as part of the Drogheda gangland feud that had exploded months earlier.
Armed Support Unit gardaí found Rochford crouching naked in the bath in a stunned condition. He was covered in blood and had suffered a broken jaw as well as slashes to his torso and head. A Stanley knife and crossbow were found at the scene.
Josh Boylan (26), Moneymore, Drogheda, Co Louth, and Keith Boylan (30), Park Heath, Drogheda, Co Meath, were among four men charged in relation to the Rochford abduction and beating.
However, in June 2020 a sitting of Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard the brothers, who are from Drogheda, had “gone off the radar” after being granted bail. Bench warrants were issued for their arrests but they could not be found.
The Irish Times has learned that, five years later, they remain at large abroad. They are believed to have spent time in Turkey, Dubai, Spain and Thailand – not always together. More recent Garda intelligence has placed them in South America.
Last week, when a number of women appeared before Dundalk Circuit Criminal Court on money-laundering charges, the Boylans were named as the leaders of the Boylan organised crime group involved in the Drogheda feud.
The money laundering the women were charged with related to the activities of the Boylans in 2020 and 2021.
Garda John Walsh of Drogheda Garda station named Keith Boylan as the leader of the Boylan organised crime group and said Josh Boylan was second in command.
He said the group was involved in the importation of drugs into the State.
The Moneymore local authority estate in Drogheda, where the brothers are from, is regarded as deprived. It was one of seven small areas in Drogheda, the Republic’s largest town, prioritised in the Government’s Revitalising Areas by Planning, Investment and Development (RAPID) programme launched in 2001.
The brothers were involved in the drugs trade in the region from a young age. Along with a number of their friends they were junior members of the criminal network run by the local Maguire brothers – Owen and Brendan. The Maguires, who are much older than the Boylans, were allied to another senior criminal from the region, Cornelius Price, who is suspected of several drug-related murders.
However, the Boylans and their young associates outgrew their underling status in the Maguire-Price drugs gang and decided to take on their bosses. They were vying for control of the lucrative drugs market in Louth. Whoever wore the crown would also have a large chunk of the market in Meath and into parts of north Dublin.
When they decided to take on the Maguire-Price mob, Keith Boylan was aged 22 and his brother was 18.
Tensions had been simmering for some time before the feud erupted when the Boylan group tried to murder Owen Maguire in a gun attack in July 2018 on Cement Road in Drogheda. He survived but was paralysed in the shooting, which was carried out by a Boylan ally Robbie Lawlor.
Among the more notorious incidents that followed was the effort to blow up a car, fitted with two gas cylinders, outside the Boylan family home in Moneymore.
It was intercepted by the Boylan gang, who immediately accused Aaron Rochford of driving the car. He was abducted and subjected to a vicious assault.
From late 2018 into 2019, homes and vehicles were destroyed in petrol bomb attacks, a marked tactic in the Drogheda feud. Brendan Maguire and Keith Boylan were wounded in tit-for-tat attempts on their lives in 2019 but both survived.
In March 2019 local Sinn Féin politician Ruairí Ó Murchú, a councillor, told the Drogheda Joint Policing Committee – a forum where gardaí discuss co-operation on policing issues with local authorities, elected representatives and community figures – that he was aware of a man who paid one of the gangs €40,000 to clear a debt they said was owed by his daughter.
“People are afraid, they are embarrassed, they just want it to go away, so they pay,” he said.
Residents in May 2019 held a rally against the spate of violent incidents in the town. But almost immediately another feud attack left a man wounded.
Keith Branigan (29), a close friend of Keith Boylan, was shot dead at the Aisling Caravan Park in Clogherhead in August 2019.
[ Personal grudges and taunts ratcheting up Drogheda gang violenceOpens in new window ]
In November of that year Richard Carberry (39), who was also close to Keith Boylan, was shot dead in Bettystown, Co Meath. However, Carberry’s killing, which is unsolved, may not have been feud related.
Two months later came the most shocking killing in the feud, the murder of 17-year-old Keane Mulready-Woods – a Maguire associate – at a house in Drogheda in January 2020. His dismembered remains were found days later in two locations in north Dublin.
Robbie Lawlor, whose shooting of Owen Maguire in 2018 began the feud, was the chief suspect.
But in a sign of the attritional nature of the drugs trade, especially during times of gun feuds, the leadership and “muscle” tiers on both sides of the dispute began to fall apart. Gardaí mounted Operation Stratus at the start of the feud in an attempt to contain and eventually stop the violence.
Ultimately, gardaí gathered the evidence required to press charges against some of the key figures driving the violence. Some have been jailed and others have fled abroad in an attempt to outrun the charges. A number of the most menacing men who directed and carried out the violence are now dead.
Robbie Lawlor (35) was shot dead in a well-planned ambush in April 2020 in the Ardoyne area of Belfast. His murder was linked to dissident republicans and Limerick’s McCarthy-Dundon gang.
Lawlor’s death was a blow to the Boylans, who quickly skipped bail and fled abroad.
Another of the Boylans key allies, Paul Crosby (29), Rathmullan Park, Drogheda, was jailed for 10 years in 2023 for aiding the murder of Mulready-Woods.
On the Maguire-Price side of the feud, Owen Maguire has not been seen in public since he was paralysed in the gun attack by Lawlor that started the feud in 2018.
His brother, Brendan Maguire, like the Boylans, disappeared after being charged in Ireland with feud-related crimes around weapons and violent disorder. Now living in the UK, he has a bullet lodged in his neck from the 2019 attempt on his life and has suffered mental health issues.
Cornelius Price (41), the Maguires’ chief ally, was in 2020 diagnosed with limbic encephalitis, a serious brain condition, and died in the UK in early 2023.
Garda sources said the disappearance of the Boylan brothers was a significant concern.
They believe the brothers will have learned much from being drawn into an outbreak of extreme violence that made them prime targets for their rivals and the Garda.
“They are still involved,” said one Garda source of the brothers’ involvement in drugs trafficking.
“And when they pop up back into the radar at some point, you’d never know what you’d be dealing with. They could be much more serious players.”
Ó Murchú went on to become the Sinn Féin TD for Louth since speaking up at the Drogheda Joint Policing Committee at the height of the feud in 2019. Though the feud has dissipated, he said, much chaos and deprivation remains.
[ Dublin gangland figures involved in Drogheda feud that killed 17-year-oldOpens in new window ]
Ó Murchú said the Drogheda feud happened when “gangs got a rush of blood to the head and decided they were bigger than they were”.
“But when you put it up to the State, they will put your lights out. And that, I think, is what happened,” he said of serious criminal charges eventually brought against the key players in the feud.
“But sometimes when someone [a drug dealer] gets put out of operation ... they can be replaced by very chaotic characters.”
The killing of Mulready-Woods had been an especially difficult period in the feud, while the destruction of houses in arson attacks created a lot of fear in Drogheda.
“The amount of council houses destroyed, the impact this was having across the board ... of course people were frightened. You were also dealing with criminals who had decided to do everything out in the wide open,” said Ó Murchú.
“There was very little in the way of restraint. They bit off more than they could chew, but it was really brutal for the people who had to live through it.
“And let’s be clear: the issues in relation to drugs – organised and disorganised – are far from gone.”
