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Dublin’s new gangland feuds: Why Drimnagh killing has led to heightened Garda concerns

Young men now engaged in several Dublin feuds were pre-teens when Kinahan-Hutch feud began and so have learned nothing from it

Blood on Knocknarea Road, Drimnagh, on Tuesday as Gardai continued their investigations into the fatal shooting of Josh Itseli. Photograph: Colin Keegan/Collins Dublin

Conor Lally's face
Conor Lally
Sat May 11 2024 - 06:00

In the space of a few months, the Dublin underworld has witnessed two savage bursts of violence that claimed the lives of Tristan Sherry, Jason Hennessy and, just last Monday, Josh Itseli. Those killings follow a period of relative calm, especially since the Kinahan-Hutch feud was brought under control about five years ago.

With new feuds opening up – involving very young men – there is growing concern a fresh wave of gangland violence has effectively already begun in what could loosely be called the post-Kinahan era. Some of those now emerging as dangerous players in simmering Dublin feuds were aged 10 and 11 when the Kinahan-Hutch feud began.

It was significant this week that, as the murder investigation into the killing of Itseli was in its very early stages in Drimnagh, another major unrelated Garda operation was under way in Corduff, west Dublin. There, gardaí were moving against one of the gangs feuding over the killings of rivals Hennessy (48), from Corduff, and Sherry (26), from Finglas, in a restaurant in Blanchardstown on Christmas Eve.

A sawn-off shotgun was seized in the midweek Corduff operation, along with cocaine and cannabis valued at almost €120,000. In February, a loaded gun was seized as gardaí believe it was being moved into position for use in the feud.

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Detectives working against organised crime in Dublin say a sustained effort will be required to keep a lid on the dispute arising from the shooting dead of Hennessy by Sherry, who was himself overpowered and killed on the spot.

The same dynamic is now very likely at play in the wake of Itseli’s death in the early hours of last Monday morning, though just how he was killed – and who fired the fatal shots – is more complex.

Itseli (20), the Irish-born son of immigrants from Democratic Republic of Congo, was a small-time drug dealer aligned to a volatile south central Dublin drugs gang. Gardaí believe he had gone to Drimnagh with a number of criminal associates to attack members of another gang with a pipe bomb.

They were intercepted by the other group on Knocknarea Rd, where cars driven by the rivals crashed head-on. A volley of shots was discharged from an AR15 semi-automatic rifle, with Itseli fatally wounded, perhaps by his own associates after they botched their plans.

Members of the rival group escaped the scene. Given the reputations of some of the men who were with Itseli – who were arrested after the killing but have since been released without charge – there are strong fears they will attack their rivals again.

There is also a completely separate dangerous situation in Finglas, north Dublin, where a dispute between rival factions claimed the life of James Whelan (29). Although two years have passed since he was shot dead, gardaí remain very concerned about the tensions between Whelan’s associates and a rival faction led by a prominent young gang leader.

Garda sources also pointed out, however, that in recent years there have been one or two gangland murders per year, compared with between 15 and 20 per year during the Celtic Tiger period.

Broadly speaking, there have been two especially bleak periods in the Republic, mainly in Dublin, for gang feuding. The decade from about 2000 to 2010 witnessed an unprecedented level of drug-related gun murders.

As the Republic became more prosperous from the late 1990s into the 2000s, the demand for drugs increased exponentially in line with disposable incomes. As the drugs trade expanded, fuelled by mass demand for cocaine for the first time in Ireland, drug-related gun crime surged because gangs of young men feuded over control of the cocaine trade.

[ How cocaine became Ireland’s biggest drug problem ]

“You had a large group, a generation, of young men, getting into cocaine dealing because that market just blew up,” said one Garda source. “And because they were so young, a lot of what went on was wild,” he added of gun attacks, including murders.

As that generation matured, the economy crashed, and those two elements combined to slow the rate of feuding. This was followed by the intense Kinahan-Hutch feud between 2015 and 2018.

The Kinahan-Hutch feud, which has long dissipated, claimed 18 lives. Though that was a very bloody period, complex trends have been at play in organised crime for some time. Drug dealing has long recovered from the Celtic Tiger crash and is now booming once more. But, overall, gun crime across the Republic remains very low.

For example, some 5,065 cases of drug dealing – “possession of drugs for sale or supply” – were recorded last year. That level of recorded drug dealing has only been surpassed once since 2003. During that same period, gun crime has fallen by more than half.

There were 86 cases of illegal “discharging of a firearm” last year, compared with a peak of 331 cases in 2007. When it comes to the crime of illegal “possession of a firearm”, there were 189 last year, compared with a peak of 452 recorded cases in 2008.

[  Ireland is awash with cocaine, but how does it get into the country ]

So if gun crime has fallen so much, why are gardaí increasingly concerned about the simmering Dublin feuds?

“The worry now is that you have one of these feud situations that really takes off, maybe several people killed in a few months, and then all of a sudden you’re back to the bad old days,” said one experienced detective. “The age profile of these people is the same as back in the early 2000s, teenagers and early 20s. And that is more or less when they’re at their most reckless.”

Other gardaí said the balance of the drugs trade, especially in Dublin, has changed significantly in the last five years. The Kinahan-Hutch feud had resulted in a Garda operation that effectively brought down the Crumlin-headquartered “Byrne organised crime group”, which ran the Kinahan cartel’s Irish operation.

Some of the Byrne-aligned and Kinahan-aligned criminals jailed for Kinahan-Hutch feud crimes are now being released from Irish prisons, having served their sentences. But their old network – the Byrne gang – remains shattered in Ireland.

“Crime is constantly changing,” said one garda source familiar with the Dublin gang scene. “Guys are going in and out of prison, or being murdered, and someone younger is coming up and they want to climb the ladder. The Kinahans are still supplying drugs into Ireland but that structure they had [in Ireland] is gone. And that’s an opportunity for other criminals to move into that space.”

Many gardaí believe the Garda clampdown on organised crime after the Kinahan-Hutch feud – especially the Regency Hotel attack in 2016 – deterred other gangs from engaging in feuding. The theory goes that the takedown of the Byrne group in the Republic was so widespread, and successful, that other drugs gang were unwilling to engage in gun crime for fear of drawing the same Garda attention. This would explain the apparently contradictory trends of drug dealing surging as gun crime has remained low.

However, young men such as like Itseli, who was aged 11 when the Regency Hotel attack occurred, have simply not learned the lessons of the last decade as they were too young.

“You had several robbed cars crashed at that scene [in Drimnagh last Monday morning], young fellas with bullet proof vests, an AR-15 [semi-automatic rifle] ... That’s all heavy duty, some of these young lads are ready to go.”

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