Few outside Dublin’s north inner city expected Gerard Hutch, the head of the Hutch organised crime gang, to come so close to winning a Dáil seat in last week’s general election.
Hutch won 3,098 first-preference votes, almost a tenth of the vote, in the four-seat constituency of Dublin Central, rattling the political establishment.
Standing as an Independent, he came fourth in the first count of votes, laying down an early challenge to two of the biggest names in Irish politics: Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and Paschal Donohoe, the Fine Gael minister who heads the group of euro-zone finance ministers.
Had Labour’s Marie Sherlock ultimately not edged Hutch out for the final seat on the eighth count, the foreign media in Dublin last weekend covering the election count might have had their “Ireland elects gangster” headlines that, for a time, looked possible.
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The back story was ready to be written had he triumphed electorally.
Gerry Hutch, the veteran criminal better known as the Monk, had returned while on bail, secured on a €100,000 bond, from Lanzarote, his second home in the Canary Islands, while a Spanish criminal investigation continues into his alleged leading role in an international money laundering network.
He was released after telling a court early last month he wanted to be freed to run in the Irish election on November 29th.
Gerry Hutch’s story goes much further back – he first rose to prominence as a serious criminal in the 1980s and 1990s.
Gardaí believe he was behind two major armed robberies in 1987 and 1996 – targeting Securicor and Brinks Allied at Marino Mart and in Clonshaugh, both north Dublin. A total of £4.7 million (€6 million) was stolen during the raids. He has always denied involvement.
When the Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab) was established in 1996 he was one of its first targets. He eventually settled, after a tax demand, for £1.5 million (€1.9 million) almost 25 years ago.
He was described in evidence by Cab to the High Court in 2018 as one of four main protagonists in the Kinahan-Hutch feud that has claimed 18 lives, including those of his brother Eddie and his nephew Gary.
Last year he was acquitted of the murder of David Byrne at the Regency Hotel in north Dublin in 2016, though the Special Criminal Court concluded that he had control of the gunmen’s AK-47 assault rifles after the attack.
The court denied Hutch his costs – thought to be well in excess of €500,000 – after finding he was the “figurehead” and “patriarchal figure” of the Hutch organised crime group which carried out the Regency attack.
While outsiders were startled by his near-election to Dáil Éireann, inside the area where Gerry Hutch grew up people offer a different analysis as to why he almost won a seat.
Gary Gannon, the Social Democrats TD, who was returned in the same count as a Dáil deputy for the Dublin Central constituency for the second time, said he “wasn’t surprised” at the strength of Hutch’s support.
Though Hutch (61), a married father and grandfather, now splits his time between Clontarf in north Dublin and Lanzarote, he is from Dublin’s inner city, as is Gannon.
“We had him on 8 or 9 per cent in first-preference votes but we didn’t expect him to do so well on transfers,” said Gannon.
He believes people voted for Hutch due to “generational neglect, frustration with the political establishment for the obvious reasons” such as the chronic shortage of housing.
“In Gerry Hutch they found an outsider and someone who could be the voice of those frustrations and maybe send a message to the top of the political system ... an opportunity to give all of us a bit of an ‘eff you’,” Gannon said.
“What Gerry Hutch tapped into, like Brexit and Donald Trump ... these are all a sign of a deeper malaise.
“I’m not worried about Gerry Hutch running the next time, I’m worried about significant far-right candidates running and tapping into that same feeling. That’s the real danger.”
Former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who represented Dublin Central as a Fianna Fáil TD for 30 years, said the extended Hutch family were very well known through many parts of the constituency, including beyond the northeast inner city. They were “well got” and involved in community sports and other groups, he said.
Ahern added Gerry Hutch was also involved in the anti-drugs movement, though some of the young members of the family later become involved in the drug trade.
“He himself was involved very much in the [anti-drugs] meetings I went to with people like Christy Burke, Tony Gregory,” said Ahern, referring respectively to the veteran Dublin councillor and the late Independent TD who represented Dublin Central from 1982 to 2009.
“He was obviously closer to Tony than he was to me. But he was there.”
Ahern said Hutch was “kind to a lot of organisations, sporting bodies, community groups, Christmas parties” and that “a lot of these people would have been very grateful for their Christmas parties and functions”. Though “it was never said who paid for a lot of these things, we all knew”, he added.
Gerry Hutch has always been seen as a Robin Hood
— North inner city source
Asked was he surprised how someone so heavily linked with organised crime won so many votes in the election, Ahern said the level of support surprised him, especially in East Wall, which is slightly removed from his heartland.
“He probably got another 1,000 votes that we didn’t expect. Some of that came from bravado, some from a bit of sympathy over the fact the family suffered so much during the conflict with the Kinahans,” said the former Fianna Fáil leader.
“And some people said: ‘Ah sure, this is a bit of craic.’ So you have to add all of that up.”
Some community workers believe Hutch’s election might have raised awareness of some of the problems in Dublin’s inner city.
Paddy Murdiff lives in Summerhill in the northeast inner city and is a convener of the North East Inner City Co-op. He has also been on the board of Dublin’s North East Inner City Programme Implementation Board.
Had Hutch been elected he would have had “a better chance” of highlighting the issues such as street drug-dealing, partly because of the media attention he would bring, said Murdiff.
“All we are is a dumping ground,” said Murdiff of the State’s attitude towards the northeast inner city, which is precisely where Hutch proved so popular with voters.
“The drug dealing outside my place in Summerhill is incredible, there’s about 10 lads outside selling drugs now. The police do nothing. If it happened in Clontarf, or somewhere else, it would be stopped immediately.”
The widespread perception locally was that Hutch had never been involved in drugs.
It is a claim repeated again and again when speaking to people from the area and those who work there. However, some are unsure if the perception of Hutch not being involved in drugs is based on truth or a carefully cultivated public persona.
While gardaí believe Hutch has been involved in the drug trade as an investor during his so-called retirement years, he was a hands-off criminal in this area. He appeared to have climbed above the day-to-day hustle of Dublin’s organised crime scene just as cocaine wars were about to break out on the streets of Dublin, unleashing an unprecedented level of gangland feuding from the early 2000s.
However, his nephews – Gary Hutch and Christopher “Bouncer” Hutch – had become involved in a drugs gang in Dublin from the late 1990s into the 2000s with Daniel Kinahan and Christopher Kinahan jnr, the sons of Christy Kinahan snr. Over the next decade the Kinahan group, with Kinahan snr as its Spanish-based leader, grew into an international cartel, with Gary Hutch rising up through the ranks before Gary Hutch was murdered by the cartel in 2015, with the Kinahan-Hutch feud then erupting.
Hutch did not respond to approaches from The Irish Times for comment this week or before the election.
Another local from the north inner city, who did not want to be named, said Hutch won much goodwill after buying the premises that Corinthians Boxing Club is run from and gifting it to the club. They said he was well known for funding community gatherings, including for the elderly in the area.
Others say Hutch’s reputation, his brand, is very different in the eyes of the people of the north inner city than in other parts of the Dublin and beyond.
“Gerry Hutch has always been seen as a Robin Hood,” said one source with vast experience working for the community in the heart of the north inner city.
“He was always known for being into armed robberies, and nobody getting hurt, but not for being into drugs. That meant a lot locally,” the source referring to the view that Hutch avoided the drug trade.
[ Johnny Watterson: Backing for Gerry Hutch symptomatic of inner-city alienationOpens in new window ]
Drugs were so prevalent in the area, the source said, that many families had effectively lost their children by the time they reached their early teens because they were taking or dealing drugs, or both.
“People wondering what the hell is going on that Hutch would get so many votes just don’t understand this community, it’s completely disaffected,” the source said.
“I would be very worried about this area and Gerry Hutch just became an interesting person to vote for. He also said, and this is probably the clincher, that Tony Gregory is his hero. And he’s also not far right.”
He was a novelty candidate this time around, even maybe a celebrity candidate
— North inner city source
The vast majority of Hutch’s first-preference votes were concentrated in the north inner city. Four polling stations – of 21 across the constituency – accounted for almost half of his first preferences: Lower Seán McDermott Street, St Laurence O’Toole CBS on Seville Place, North Strand Church parish hall and Seán O’Casey Community Centre in East Wall.
In the run-up to the election, Fionnaigh Connaughton-O’Connor co-ordinated a voter registration and information programme at the Dublin Adult Learning Centre on Mountjoy Square in the north inner city.
“Some people were saying that things never change, and it’s always the same people [elected]. So maybe [Hutch] was there to shake it up a bit,” said Connaughton-O’Connor.
“Other people said he was known very well locally for doing a lot of things for people, this is certainly what you hear. He wasn’t a man in a suit. He was a local person; kind of like a Trump ‘non-politician politician’.”
There are mixed views about whether Hutch will run again.
“He was a novelty candidate this time around, even maybe a celebrity candidate,” said one north inner city source.
“But if he goes again, that novelty is gone. And he didn’t really look or sound impressive so maybe that aura of ‘the Monk’ is washed away a bit now?”
Others admired his social-media campaigning, saying that it was “clever” and “funny” and that images and videos of Hutch climbing ladders to erect his own posters further fostered his “man of the people, north inner city boy” reputation.
Maureen O’Sullivan was a team member for Tony Gregory and, after he died, represented the constituency as a TD from 2009 to 2020.
“Gerry Hutch appealed to quite a number of people because of the way he came out of a very poor background and he didn’t let himself be drawn into what so many others did: taking drugs and going down that road,” O’Sullivan said.
[ Politics is an attention economy and Gerry Hutch garnered plenty of itOpens in new window ]
She believes that if Hutch had been elected he could have “stood up to the system, as such, and been a voice for the areas he sees and knows are neglected”.
What does she think Gregory, who also “stood up to the system”, made of Hutch?
“I think there’d be a respect for where he has come from ... Tony would have known so many young men, many of them dead now because of drugs and not being able to get the services they needed,” said O’Sullivan.
“So there would have been a ‘Well, fair play to you, you didn’t go down that road and you tried to give back to your community’.”
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