Heading into a 14-year prison sentence in 1985, Larry Dunne, who more or less single-handedly created the illegal drugs trade in Ireland, told gardaí, “if you think we’re bad, wait till you see what’s coming after us”.
Thousands of young lives were lost or blighted in the years that Dunne’s gang flooded Dublin’s most deprived areas with heroin. His chilling prophecy has been fulfilled in spades as one generation of even more ruthless criminals succeeds another, not just in Dublin but in other towns and cities as well.
Dunne was eventually extradited from Portugal and put out of business by an under-resourced but determined drug squad. He was released in 1995 and died in 2020, aged 72.
Stephen Breen and John Hand, two experienced crime journalists with the Irish Sun, have now chronicled the violent lives and times of one of the most recent inheritors of Larry Dunne’s sordid legacy. They set out a narrative of cold-blooded murders by the Kinahan and Hutch gangs, planned and executed for the most part with clinical precision. In parallel, the authors describe the devastation and agony visited upon the partners and children of the victims.
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This book is timely for a number of reasons. It should awaken society to the scale, depth and depravity of organised crime in 21st-century Ireland. And it should serve to inform the public of the bravery, resourcefulness and determination of the men and women who work within the criminal justice system to thwart these evils – gardaí, prosecutors, judges and prisons staff.
The research here has been meticulous and painstaking, drawing on co-operative law enforcement sources but also from those associated with both victims and perpetrators. It is also necessary to acknowledge the courage of the two authors – and crime journalists generally – who venture into this dangerous area of reporting without the protection of a badge or a warrant card. This work deserves to be recognised.
The late TJ O’Reilly, a former deputy commissioner of An Garda Síochána, once put it thus: police action alone will not eliminate the drugs trade; it merely displaces those running it, making room for others. Even as the Kinahans and their enemies move off the stage, there are others, as yet unknown to the public, waiting in the wings.
Conor Brady is a former editor of The Irish Times
