Decline in organised crime confirms recession has been bad for business

Ireland’s recession has coincided with plummeting gun crime and a collapse in the drug trade that has left criminal gangs under financial pressure, writes CONOR LALLY, Crime Correspondent

IF TWO events book-end the boom-to-bust cycle of organised crime in Ireland, they are the murders of gang leaders Martin Hyland, from Cabra on Dublin’s north side, and his successor, Eamon Dunne, from nearby Finglas.

At the time of his murder in December 2006, 39-year-old Hyland’s name had become a byword for big-league organised crime. He was the leader of one of Ireland’s biggest drugs gangs, based in Finglas.

Not content with flooding Dublin with heroin, cocaine and cannabis, his cartel also sold drugs to smaller gangs in the city and to those outside the capital. He also helped those groupings plan major armed robberies.

The resulting media and Garda attention became so intense that in the last year of his life drugs with an estimated street value of €15 million were seized from his henchmen. About 30 of them were arrested and charged under Operation Oak, established in 2005 to bring Hyland down.

His lieutenants quickly came to view him as a liability and decided to shoot him dead. On a December morning in 2006 a gunman unloaded a handgun into his head and body as he lay sleeping, face down in bed, in his niece’s house at Scribblestown Park in Finglas (a young plumber working in the house, Anthony Campbell, 20, was shot dead by the killers in case he was able to identify them).

Into the power vacuum stepped Hyland’s chief lieutenant, Eamon Dunne.

Fast-forward 40 months to April 2010: Dunne, by now aged 34, has presided over the bloodiest reign of any gang leader in the history of Irish organised crime, ordering a dozen gun murders. His life ended with him face down in a pool of beer and blood on the floor of the Faussagh House pub in Cabra.

An Irish-led international drug cartel based in southern Spain had become concerned that the killing spree Dunne was directing was drawing too much Garda attention upon crime gangs in Dublin, the city for which it was the main drug wholesaler.

After Dunne was killed, there was no scramble for the Finglas throne. Since Hyland’s murder, the drug trade had peaked and crashed.

That slide has continued inexorably ever since.

The drug trade boomed in parallel with the economy as demand increased in line with disposable incomes. In 2006, gardaí seized €77.92 million worth of drugs, the most seized in any year of the boom until that point.

The number of controlled drug offences recorded in 2006 was 14,232, a record, representing an increase of 45 per cent in just two years.

In the first two years of Dunne’s reign, the drug trade went into orbit nationally, with the value of drugs seized by the Garda moving upwards of €100 million. The number of controlled drug offences peaked in 2008 at 23,405.

Gun crime peaked in 2007, when a combined total of 750 cases of discharging of a firearm and possession of a firearm were recorded.

But the drug trade was not immune to the recession. The value of drugs seized by the Garda fell to €42 million and €28 million in 2009 and 2010 respectively.