Deep personal hatred, teenage boys create dangerous mix in Finglas feud

Gardaí in Finglas on Dublin’s northside are now confronting a gangland feud similar to the southside Crumlin-Drimnagh dispute which continued for a decade and cost 15 lives. In both cases large drugs gangs split in two after internal disputes and gun feuding quickly ensued.

In the case of the Finglas feud, which has erupted since the start of this year, gardaí expect the rival sides to remain highly motivated for years to attack each other. The same sources say all of the men and boys involved know each other, meaning a deep personal animosity is driving the violence, as was the case with the Crumlin-Drimnagh feud which ended about 10 years ago.

“We are probably better at getting on top of these [feuds] now than we were before,” said one Garda source. “Garda operations against the Kinahan-Hutch feud caught a lot more of these guys much earlier than in some of the other feuds we’ve seen down the years.”

[ Kinahan ally emerging as new leading figure in Irish gangland, gardaí believe ]

Another Garda source said the specialist units in the force which target organised crime had learned a lot from the Kinahan-Hutch feud, saying those skills — and the beefed up resources of the anti-gangland units — were now being turned on the Finglas factions.

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“This is a small feud; it’s not a Kinahan-Hutch feud, it’s more of a local situation,” said another garda. “But a lot of these people are very young and when you have that young age group you get these arson attacks on houses, shootings into houses — all that chaos. And we have seen that even these localised feuds can cost a lot of lives.”

Another source said when very young men and boys populate feuding gangs, the violence is often “wilder”. He cited the Crumlin-Drimnagh feud, the Drogheda dispute and the Limerick feud.

“These petrol bombings we’ve seen in Finglas are typical of the attacks kids can carry out,” he said. “You also get things like shootings into houses, grenades thrown at houses. They’ll attack anyone’s house, someone granny’s house, if they want to get at that person.”

Gardaí in Finglas, backed by specialist units, have already carried out waves of raids on local suspects. The latest such operation took place on Thursday when four people were arrested. One was detained on suspicion of feud-related incidents in January while a gun and silencer were also discovered during the searches.

While those suspects were being questioned on Thursday, a house in Finglas was targeted in an arson, feud-related, attack. That followed three petrol bombings last weekend on properties in the Barnamore, Virginia and Casement estates in the suburb.

One was at the family home in Barnamore Crescent of James Whelan (29), who was a leading figure on one side of the feud but was shot dead by his rivals in Finglas in April in the first fatal attack in the feud. Supplied with drugs by the Kinahan cartel, he had led the large Finglas gang before it split. However, the cartel was forced to scale back its Irish operation as so many of its members were jailed or fled Ireland during the Garda clampdown on the Kinahan-Hutch feud. When that scaling back occurred, the Finglas gang leader lost the drugs supply line from the cartel and his position was then undermined and became weaker.

Whelan’s gang split after an internal row and since the start of this year a feud between them has worsened, with drive-by shootings, petrol bombings, beatings and at least one abduction. Approximately 70 feud-related incidents have been recorded to date.

The shooting dead of convicted drug dealer Whelan in the early hours of Sunday morning, April 3rd, represented an escalation in the violence. He had gone to the Deanstown estate to carry out a petrol bombing on the morning of his killing — in revenge for shootings into several houses in Finglas in the days before. He was spotted by some of the men with whom he was feuding, chased through the estate and shot dead.

Several sources have told The Irish Times that the older, more established criminals on both sides of the feud recruited many younger boys into their ranks during the pandemic. There is now concern that these boys are being used to courier and sell drugs and that some of them are being directed to carry out the attacks on houses that have become a feature of the feud in recent months.