East Tyrone Brigade of the IRA, the most lethal but least criminally corrupt element of the Provisional IRA during the three decades of Troubles in the North, ignored its leadership orders and moved against drug dealers in Dungannon in September this year.The move followed the killing of Eamonn Hughes, 48, a local man who was stabbed to death after an evening of celebrations for his daughter Siobhan's 18th birthday. The working class housing estates in Dungannon, such as Lisnahull, where the Hughes family live, had become beset by the anti-social problems associated with heroin addiction in the recent years of the "peace process".This had never happened before in working class areas of the North, where paramilitary groups simply expelled or shot anyone using hard drugs. In the three years since the IRA stopped "punishment" shootings and beatings, heroin and other drugs have flooded into republican and loyalist areas.In places like Belfast, south Armagh and Derry, ex-IRA figures are lining their pockets from providing protection for the drug dealers. Tyrone is a different matter. The Tyrone IRA are old-fashioned, none from criminal backgrounds, and they had become increasingly angry at the influx of heroin into what had previously been largely safe places like Dungannnon.Two nights after the killing, the East Tyrone Brigade acted. In a classic decoy move, the local PSNI station was taken out of operation by a bomb scare -- using an entirely innocent party who found a suspected pipe bomb in his garden and brought it to the station. With police communications down, IRA units then simultaneously visited the homes of nine alleged drug dealers in the town. They were ordered at gunpoint to load up their families and possessions into their cars and leave the town. All did so.Heroin dealing has stopped in Dungannon, and so has much of the torment experienced by its inhabitants.
What the IRA did in Dungannon is illegal and cannot be condoned. But it is very hard to find a law-abiding citizen in the town or county who will condemn it. Heroin dealing, for years restricted to the inner city and troubled suburban estates of Dublin, has reached into every provincial town in Ireland. The killing of Eamonn Hughes was the last straw for the people of Dungannon. Every provincial paper in Ireland is now writing regularly about the social and criminal side-effects of heroin. Last week it was the turn of Kerry's Eye, which led with a story about two local men who had broken into the home of a bachelor farmer at Annascaul and stolen €2,000 to feed their heroin habit. The two drug addicts, Michael O'Driscoll, 29, and Keith Purcell, 34, burgled the farmer's home while he was out, stealing the money from the biscuit tin where he kept his cash. The two accused were given four weeks to pay the farmer €4,000 but when Purcell refused to do so, he was sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment. The grim reality is that heroin has now infected every part of Ireland and this has happened during the tenure of a Fianna Fail-led government which placed law and order as its number one priority. The Government did "deliver" on its promises of increasing the size of the garda force by 2,000 members to a record 14,000, providing whatever resources were sought and passing a raft of new criminal legislation, particularly during the tenure of Michael McDowell. It was McDowell who put forward the proposed legislation on allowing covert surveillance intercepts to be used in criminal cases -- legislation for which will come before the Cabinet on Tuesday.All this, however, has apparently done nothing to stop the mushrooming of heroin and other drug dealing in the State. It has singularly failed to stop the increasing violence of the gangs that supply the drugs. It did not prevent two young gangsters from pursuing Shane Geoghegan as he walked home in Limerick in the early hours of last Sunday morning and shooting him up to 15 times.
In the early part of last week, RTE commentators and guests were using the term "tipping point" about the murder of Shane Geoghegan -- comparing it to the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996. The gang which murdered Shane Geoghegan was last week in the same situation in which John Gilligan's gang found itself in the aftermath of the murder of Veronica Guerin. There is massive public outrage. The identities of the gang leaders have been widely broadcast. Even the identities of the two young gunmen, one from Limerick one from Dublin, are well known to gardai and the people of Limerick. However, there the similarities might end.
In the immediate aftermath of Veronica's murder, the Government dithered, unsure what to do. At first there were vague promises of "crackdowns" on the gangsters but there was no action. The sense of public outrage grew and grew. Wreaths of flowers appeared on the railings outside the Dail. The palpable sense of anger forced the Government into action. They gave the green light to then Garda Commissioner Pat Byrne, who turned to his top investigator, Chief Superintendent Tony Hickey. He set his detectives to work and they methodically and remorselessly began to destroy John Gilligan and his gang. That point -- the direction to Hickey and his squad to go after Gilligan by whatever means necessary -- could be described as a 'tipping point'. The State followed up with criminal assets legislation, which has since become an international model for anti-organised crime operations.
The gang which murdered Shane Geoghegan are similar to John Gilligan's gang. They are uneducated petty criminals who have risen to power through the use of deadly violence against their opponents, including any innocent member of society prepared to give evidence or speak out against them. The Dundon-McCarthys countenance no opposition and have achieved the same status as the Gilligan gang in that they have been allowed to become a dominant force in the drugs trade. As Gilligan controlled the cannabis and cocaine trade in Dublin, so the Dundon-McCarthys control the trade of cocaine and heroin in Munster, reaching into the Dublin and even UK markets now.
With more resources at their disposal than ever before and the identical sense of public outrage throughout the country, there should have been evidence of some kind of 'tipping point' last week. If there was, it swung back the wrong way, in favour of the gangsters. The point may have come some time on Wednesday afternoon when the funeral of the captain of the Garryowen thirds rugby team finished. By teatime on Wednesday, RTE dropped Shane Geoghegan's murder as the lead item on its news bulletin. Strangely, it opted to lead its 5.30pm bulletin with raids by the PSNI on a network of apartments and houses in the North where herbal cannabis was being grown, an interesting story but not one of national importance.
This may be seen as the point at which Shane Geoghegan became an official statistic -- the 127th victim of gangland violence in the past decade for which the clearance rate stands at considerably less than 10 per cent. Last Monday and Tuesday, there were media appearances by Garda Commissioner Murphy, an assurance by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern that "no stone would be left unturned", and a subdued debate in Dail Eireann on Thursday. A reported 20 houses in Limerick and Dublin were raided and a small amount of drugs recovered. There were no arrests. Embarrassingly, Limerick gang figure Ger Dundon, sought on a warrant since October for failing to appear in court on road traffic offences, handed himself in for committal on a 10-month prison sentence.
