Gary Hutch funeral told family does not want revenge

The mother of a career criminal shot dead in Spain has told mourners at his funeral the family did not want revenge.

Kay Hutch, mother of deceased Gary Hutch (34), said the pain she had endured at losing her son was unbearable and she would not wish it on others.

“We do not want retaliation,” she told several hundred mourners at her son’s funeral in Dublin’s north inner city mass on Tuesday morning.

“We don’t wish our pain on any other family. I let God be our judge,” she said.

Parish priest at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Sean Mc Dermott St, Dublin 1; Richard Ebejer reiterated that call, saying the family had asked him to speak out against any plans to avenge the father-of-one's shooting dead last month.

He said it was not his place nor the place of any of those present to judge Hutch, whose murder was believed to be drug related, for “any sins he may have committed through human weakness”.

“We are not here to judge, but to mourn,” he said in a service where boxing gloves, a Dublin GAA T-shirt and a motorbike helmet were among the offertory gifts to signify Hutch’s interests in life.

Family members and close friends carried the coffin the short distance from the Hutch family home on Champion’s Avenue in the north inner city to the church.

The chief mourners followed in funeral cars behind the empty hearse.

As well as Hutch’s parents Patsy and Kay, the congregation was also led by his daughter, brothers Patrick and Jordon and sister Lyndsey.

Hutch’s brother Derek was not present as he is currently serving 16 years for a variety of offences including the manslaughter of a man stabbed to death, co-ordinating a botched robbery in which an accomplice was shot dead by the Garda, and a separate charge of possession of a firearm.

A letter from Derek Hutch was read out by a young male relative in which he said he enjoyed the time they had spent together recently when his brother, Gary, was home for a period in Dublin.

He said he would also cherish the memories of growing up together “me blaming you and you blaming me and ma killing the two of us”.

The dead man’s uncle Gerry Hutch, also known as The Monk, was also not present at the church service.

Local politicians Christy Burke (Ind) and former junior minister Joe Costello (Lab) joined the mourners as did former Dublin senior football manager Paul ‘Pillar’ Caffrey, a Garda member based in the north inner city.

An anticipated heavy Garda presence around the funeral service did not materialise.

Two uniformed gardaí patrolled the street outside the church and while there were other gardaí parked in cars down side streets, the visible policing operation was small.

Gary Hutch’s burial was taking place at Glasnevin Cemetery, north Dublin, on Tuesday afternoon.

Gardaí believe Gary Hutch’s murder, in a well planned gun attack on September 24th, was drugs-related. He was shot dead beside a swimming pool in a communal area of the Angel de Miraflores apartments complex, near Marbella on the Costa del Sol almost two weeks ago.

An effort had been made to shoot him in Marbella in August of last year but the attack was botched and well-known boxer Jamie Moore was wounded instead.

Gary Hutch had left Spain immediately after that murder bid, apparently carried out by a gang who believed he was an informer and had supplied intelligence that resulted in the seizure of a UK-bound drugs shipment from Spain.

He went to Amsterdam and also spent time at home in Dublin before moving back to Spain.

Gary Hutch was a member of a crime syndicate in the south of Spain based around the Marbella area that is led by a number of Irish men but which has links globally.

The gang is regarded as the main drugs wholesaler supplying the Irish market and has been targeted as part of Operation Shovel, an international operation aimed at disrupting its routes and confiscating its assets.

In May 2010, 33 suspected members of the gang were arrested, many of them in Estepona, Marbella, Fuengirola and Mijas in Spain.

Gary Hutch was the sole suspect arrested in Ireland as part of the operation, which involved 700 police officers in five countries. Among those detained in Spain was Dubliner Christy Kinahan, a 53-year-old father-of-three.

The convicted drug-dealer was the key target of the raids and is the head of the gang Hutch was working for at the time of his death.

The crime syndicate’s members have been increasingly drawn into gun violence on the Costa del Sol, with Gary Hutch the third Irish man connected to the gang gunned down in the area.

Gary Hutch was on the scene when close associate and multiple murder suspect Paddy Doyle (27), from Portland Place, Dublin, was shot dead near Marbella in February 2008.

His younger brother Barry Doyle (29) is also a hired killer and is currently serving life for the 2008 murder of Shane Geoghegan in Limerick.

Gary Hutch was also associated with Dubliner Gerard Kavanagh(44), an enforcer and debt collector for the Kinahan gang who was shot dead in Spain last September.

In 2006 when a young Dublin man was shot and wounded in the city, he named Gary Hutch as the person who tried to kill him. However, the witness later withdrew this evidence, claiming he had only named Hutch as the gunman to get revenge on him after hearing rumours he was having an affair with his girlfriend.

“I couldn’t tell you, I could have said Mass and I wouldn’t have known,” the shooting victim said in court when asked to confirm that while he was in the Mater hospital, he had told a garda Gary Hutch had shot him.

In 2001, Gary Hutch was jailed for six years for his role in the robbery of jewellery worth £32,000 and £5,000 cash from a businessman in Malahide, north Dublin.

The man was in bed with his wife when they woke up to find four masked men in the room, brandishing a shotgun. They handcuffed the man, brought him downstairs and forced him to open his safe.

Gary Hutch never entered the house, but acted as the getaway driver.

He was on bail at the time in relation to other theft charges, for which he was later jailed for four years.

Despite a judge ordering that a four-year and six-year jail term should run consecutively because the jewellery raid was carried out while Hutch was on bail, he was freed from prison in 2006.

Since then Gary Hutch had spent much of his time living in Spain, working in the drugs trade. He also spent some time in Ireland and was involved in organised crime in Dublin.

When a bank official was kidnapped at a house in Co Kildare six years ago and threatened that he must go to his place of work at the Bank of Ireland vaults on College Green in Dublin's south inner city and take money for the gang, Gary Hutch was a chief suspect.

The official was told his girlfriend’s family would be harmed if he did not comply. A total of €7.6 million was taken, almost all of which was never recovered.