The Trouble With Guns

"Ya’ll niggas know/fuck with my dough/ then the guns come out.” It’s Slane 2005. If the rumours are true, then 50 Cent will spit out that line and others like it to 80,000 Irish fans. “AR-15, co-exist to make the shell case muffle/ Scope, infrared, run you’re still dead/ Hit your calf, hit your ass, hit ya back, then your head/ Contract killa, murder for the scrilla/ Search, find a nigga, run up behind a nigga/ Shoot car windows out to flatline a nigga/ Gun pop, heart stop, homie this is heavy.”

Hip hop, rap, gangsta rap, whatever you want to label it, has enjoyed growing success in Ireland. And why wouldn’t it? As a genre, it has produced some of the most exciting and innovative music of modern times. Lyrically though, as Morrissey might observe, it says nothing to me about my life. A world of bling bada bling, hoes and bitches, is far removed from the day to day experience of the average Irishman – or woman for that matter.
But the other, and perhaps defining, image associated with hip-hop, that of gangs, guns and violence, has become increasingly prevalent in Irish life. In April, three gangland murders occurred within the space of just ten days. On 3 April, Dubliner Jimmy Curran was shot in the head at point blank range, as he sat drinking in The Green Lizard pub on Francis Street. In Clonee, Co. Meath, as he left for work, on 12 April, 29-year-old Joseph Rafferty was shot twice in the upper body and died. Then on 14 April, a well known criminal Terry Dunleavy (27) was shot four times in the head as he tried to flee his killer in Croke Villas, near Croke Park.
There have been nine such killings in the capital alone over the last year and a half, but the carnage is not confined to Dublin. Just last week, in Sligo, a 29-year-old man was shot in the head on a busy street in broad daylight.
There are times when the Gardai and the Department of Justice might seem to be massaging the statistics to suit their own agenda – but there is no doubt that at 40% there has been a dramatic increase in the discharging of firearms.
Armed robberies have also been common place. Already this year nearly €5 million has been stolen in a succession of robberies on cash-in-transit vans in the Republic, while there has been a number of “smaller” raids on post offices and banks. Last year, a senior manager in Brinks Allied spoke of cash transit companies being “under siege from armed gangs”.
Guns it seems, are remarkably easy to come by and their use amongst the criminal fraternity is constantly on the increase, despite the fact that Gardaí are recovering illegally-held firearms on a daily basis.
“It's par for the course with any Garda division,” says Inspector Jim Brown of Limerick City Garda station, who has seen a serious escalation of gang and gun-related criminality in the city. "It’s a matter of record that recently we’ve recovered firearms such as Ingram machine pistols, and we’ve recovered a lot of rifles and shotguns."
Politicians, though concerned, are no longer surprised by the easy availability of firearms in Ireland.
“Well, a lot of West Dublin and Limerick would be notorious for the amount of guns available to criminal gangs,” says Labour TD Joan Burton, a Dail Deputy for Dublin West, and a former Minister of State For Justice. “In Dublin, we’d be talking about areas such as Corduff, Clondalkin, parts of Finglas, on out towards Coolock. And on the South side Ballyfermot and on out towards Tallaght. There are active criminal gang, in all of these areas – and accessing guns doesn’t seem to be a problem for them.”
But just how easy is it to get an illegal firearm and where are these guns coming from? Alan Croughan has been working as a freelance investigative journalist, specialising in crime reporting, for over five years. He has contributed to RTE, the Irish Mirror and Irish Crime magazine. He’s a reformed criminal, who spent almost ten years in Mountjoy Prison for armed robbery. He remains in close touch with the criminal underworld.
“Guns are so easy to come by it's unbelievable,” says Croughan. “I could have a sawn-off shotgun for you within the hour. I’d just pick up the phone and ring a guy. What he’d probably do is stick the gun in a bag and drop it in a graveyard. He’d then tell me what grave-stone it’s at. I’d go meet him in a pub, give him the money and that’s it. He’s not at risk and I’ve got a gun. It's as easy as that.”
Anybody who’s anybody in the criminal world, says Croughan, has a gun. “Once you know people, it's happy days. It’s a lot easier to access them than it was when I was doing armed robberies in the '80s and early '90s. Guns in Dublin are two a penny.
"Anybody who is involved in drug dealing has them," he adds. Maybe the ordinary seller on the street doesn’t have one but the guy he’s selling them for, definitely, without a shadow of a doubt will have hardware. But, you know, you have to have them if you’re involved in that game. It’s your only protection. If you don’t have guns you’ll either be dead or in prison after six months, or just put out of business through intimidation or being shot.”
Some of the guns on the streets come into criminal hands through theft. Over the last three years 1,330 firearms of the 210,000 legally held guns in the country have been stolen. Not that aspiring criminals need to steal shooters to get them. Guns are frequently imported with large drug shipments – though the majority originate from republican sources. Not, Alan Croughan insists, from the Provisional IRA.
“It’s mainly splinter groups and those formerly in the INLA," he explains. "When the INLA went on ceasefire, a lot of their members came south. During internment in the North, an awful lot of INLA members moved down to Dublin, Cork and Limerick and became involved in organised crime, constantly growing in power and contacts. And they still had access to the weapons: the INLA had there own arms dumps of weapons imported from Libya and the like.
"They’ve been round a long time and stock-piled weapons, which the former members are using to their advantage financially by selling them off within Ireland, and to gangs in the UK.”
Croughan's views on the topic of Republican guns are not shared by TDs. The Minister for Justice Michael McDowell points the finger at the Provisional IRA, as does Joan Burton.
“The guns are coming from two sources,” she says. “One is the IRA and the other is the drugs trade, and both are obviously inter-linked and have been over the last twenty years. A lot of the people in these criminal gangs pop up as Republican activists of some kind, either directly for the IRA or for some supposed splinter group of the IRA. They are all the same anyway, in my view.”
The fact that the killer of Jimmy Curran was almost certainly an IRA hitman notwithstanding, Croughan insists that the Provos are peripheral to this game. “I personally don’t believe that the Provisional IRA is involved in drugs because I know too many Provos," he says. "And I know what their stance is. They are involved in everything else alright, but not drugs. I’m not trying to justify them. But it’s mainly the INLA boys and other splinter groups.
"Look at it this way. If you are a career car thief and you’ve been at it for twenty years, within that twenty year period you will have been arrested, charged and convicted at least once. If the IRA were involved in drugs, and they were around a long while, surely some members of Sinn Fein and the IRA would have been arrested for drugs – but that hasn’t been the case, as far as I can recollect.”

Where gangland related murders are concerned there have been very few convictions. Fewer then one in six murder cases over the last seven years, in which guns were used, have been solved.
“A lot of these hit men are so professional you wouldn’t believe it,” says Croughan. “What happens is: if a hit man goes out to shoot somebody he puts cotton wool up his nose and cotton wool in his ears. He wears surgical gloves over his hands and then puts normal gloves over them. This is because when you discharge a firearm, the residue from the discharge will even go through your clothes and on to your body. You think that going home and having a shower will be good enough, but it’s not.
"What a lot of them do is they urinate into a basin and rub that on themselves and the acid from the urine kills the residue on the body. The places that they concentrate on are between the fingers, in the ears, under the groin area and in between the toes.
"Some shootings are done by hired junkies, but the ones where someone wants a guaranteed killing carried out by professional hit men, at a cost of maybe 20 grand. If the big fish wants to ensure not getting caught, they employ someone who can withstand intensive questioning, meaning one of these professionals.”
In terms of curbing the problem, Joan Burton says more police are needed to work within communities where gangs are known to exist and gather intelligence. In her constituency, there has been a 36% rise in local gun crime.
“The knock-on effect of gang violence is that these people have become very powerful and have a sense of being above the law," she says. "That, in turn, enables them to oppress local communities. There is a reign of fear that has huge implications for the communities that some of these guys live in and prey on.”
Croughan believes the Gardaí are doing all they can. He points to initiatives like Operation Crossover in West Dublin. “The Gardaí know exactly who is involved in organised crime. I mean in West Dublin it’s mainly four guys controlling it, The Enforcer, The Organiser, The Financier and The Distributor. The Gardaí know these people and what they’re up to. They just can’t pin anything on them.
"There’s only so much they can do. I mean, these guys have people paid off, all over the place. The Gardaí can only act on the information that they are given and very few people will talk. A lot of the seizures come from information passed through to them. That’s why informants are so important."
But where the rule of the gun runs, it's hard to penetrate. No one wants to be a tout who ends up pushing up daisies. Which leaves the question: is there another way entirely we should be approaching this?