A senior garda has defended the absence of police when a hit squad killed a gangland figure during a boxing event at the Regency Hotel in Dublin.
Ahead of the funeral of Vincent Ryan tomorrow, who was shot dead last Monday, the head of the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau said it was impossible for the force to monitor every gang member at all times.
“There are key criminal figures in lots of locations at any given time,” Detective Chief Superintendent Michael O’Sullivan said.
“They go about their business and they don’t always engage in crime, whether they attend a football match or a 21st party, or whether they go to a concert, they go about their business but they don’t always commit crime.”
The drug squad chief was interviewed for a UTV documentary which airs tonight.
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The gardai were criticised for not being present at the north Dublin hotel on February 5, when at least six men, two wearing SWAT-style uniforms and carrying AK-47 machine guns and one of them disguised as a woman, murdered David Byrne and injured two other men at a boxing weigh-in attended by about 200 people. Byrne, 34, was known to have connections with an international drug cartel run by Christopher Kinahan, 59, who is based in Spain.
The attack was believed to be part of a feud between rival drug gangs and gardai had monitored similar events previously.
“There was certainly no intelligence regarding a threat, it could have happened had they been at an event somewhere else. There was no way it could have been known what was going to happen,” Mr O’Sullivan said.
The Sunday Times recently quoted garda sources who said there was no police presence because of an oversight in which different garda units each thought the other was attending.
The documentary crew also interviewed a lawyer in Marbella, Spain. Antonio Flores said the Spanish court system made bringing drug dealers to justice difficult.
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“This is an endemic problem of the Spanish criminal system. Courts in Spain are slow, they are overloaded with work, there’s a saturation of cases and they can’t deal with them as they would like,” he said.
Despite assurances from Mr O’Sullivan that the gardai had the ability and the resources to tackle the drug feud, Dermot O’Brien, the president of the Garda Representative Association, told the programme that the force was understaffed and underfunded.
“Since the economy has gone downhill, we’ve had 2,500 members retire and they haven’t been replaced. Society is being fooled that the gardai are fully resourced,” he said.
Vincent Ryan, the victim of last week’s shooting in the northside suburb of Finglas, was a brother of Alan Ryan, the Real IRA Dublin leader who was killed in similar circumstances in 2012.
Vincent, 25, was shot several times as he sat in his car, shortly after his girlfriend, Kelly, and their new baby, Phoenix, had got out.
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In a statement at the weekend, his family called for no retaliation for his death and denied he was involved in criminal or paramilitary activity. They specifically denied he had supplied the guns used in the Regency attack.
Ryan had been a member of his late brother’s gang but was no longer involved with the Real IRA, they said.
Men in balaclavas fired tribute shots over the coffin of Alan Ryan at his funeral, and gardai were expecting the Real IRA to “put on a show” for Vincent Ryan’s funeral, which takes place at 9.50am in the Holy Trinity Church in Donaghmede, in north Dublin. It is believed there will be a heavy but discreet garda presence.
There will be a “traditional republican family funeral”, but Dermot Ryan, his brother, said: “For the avoidance of any doubt, he will not receive a military funeral.”
Open Warfare: Ireland’s Gangland Feud airs on UTV Ireland at 9pm tonight.