On Monday, it will be 10 years since the journalist, Veronica Guerin, was shot dead in Dublin. It should have been a wake-up call. Instead, there has been a dramatic increase in the drug-related crime and gangland violence she was investigating, reports Conor Lally
An uncharacteristically cold summer breeze gusts down Dublin's River Liffey. The city traffic is chaotic. Shoppers and workers from nearby offices go busily about their business dodging puddles left on the pavements by the heavy showers. Life whizzes by.
For a small group huddled on the boardwalk running along Eden Quay on the river, the mid-June morning unfolds at a slower pace. After collecting their daily prescription of the heroin replacement drug, methadone, in clinics and pharmacies across the inner city, they congregate in the shadow of Liberty Hall.
Some push babies in buggies. They have the unmistakable drawl and vacant stare of the addict. The ravages of heroin seem to have almost completely devoured their bodies.
They take pills from little plastic bags in their tracksuit pockets to sell and barter between their group. Tablets to make them high, others to bring them down. Heroin to make them forget, methadone if they haven't had enough. Maybe some cocaine.
If you can snort it, smoke it, pop it or inject it, the ladies and gentlemen of the quays' heroin club can provide it.
On Friday and Saturday nights in pubs and clubs across Ireland, a not dissimilar scenario unfolds. Mobile phones are ringing and texting is frantic as people organise a few lines of cocaine or some Es before the pubs close and the nightclubs open. Those buying and selling the pills and powders wear the designer labels of the trendy clubber. They may work in professional positions for good salaries and live in smart new apartments in sought-after neighbourhoods. But together with the socio-economically disadvantaged boardwalk crowd they all fund one of Ireland's fastest-growing industries: the €1 billion illicit drugs trade.
Tonight, tens of thousands of young people from all social classes throughout Ireland will embark on another drug-fuelled Saturday night of partying. But few would acknowledge any connection between their social lives and the murder of young Dubliner James Perdue. The 22-year-old father of one, whose girlfriend is expecting a second child, was shot twice outside an apartment complex in Donaghmede, north Dublin, after he had gone for chips in the early hours of Monday morning. According to gardaí, Perdue was a small-time drug dealer and his death is being linked to that trade.
His killing was a major news story this week. It presented Opposition parties and the media with a stick with which to beat the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell. But next week nobody - save his friends, family and the gardaí investigating his murder - will remember the name James Perdue. It will linger slightly longer in the minds of those crime reporters who wrote about his violent death this week. But give it a couple of weeks and they too will struggle to recall who he was. He is already yesterday's story. It may be cruel to view his murder in these terms, but it is an accurate appraisal.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
MONDAY MARKS THE tenth anniversary of the murder of Sunday Independent crime journalist Veronica Guerin. She was killed when the pillion passenger on a motorcycle fired several shots into her car on Naas Road, Clondalkin, on Wednesday, June 26th, 1996. Her death followed a series of pieces she had written and was researching about drug dealer John Gilligan and his gang, although the exact motive for her murder has never really been established.
Her killing was supposed to be a wake-up call, but a decade on gangland violence is on the increase.
Perdue's killing was the twelfth gun murder so far this year. If the second half of the year proves as busy for the gunmen, 2006 will be the bloodiest yet recorded for gun crime. Last year, there were 21 gun murders, a 10-year high. The number of firearms in circulation is at an all-time high. Last year, gardaí seized 900 weapons, up from 580 in 1996.
The size of the drugs trade now dwarfs that of 1996 when Guerin was killed. In that year, the Garda and Revenue Commissioners' Customs and Excise officers seized cannabis, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and amphetamines with an estimated value of €30 million. (Three major seizures in 1996 have been excluded because they were not destined for the Irish market.) Last year, the value of main drug types seized reached €107 million.
It has long been accepted internationally that the authorities in any country seize, at most, 10 per cent of the drugs on sale in their jurisdiction. That estimate values Ireland's drugs trade at around €1 billion.
In 1996, proceedings relating to drug dealing were begun against 3,953 people. By last year, that figure had more than doubled to 9,867. The involvement of foreign nationals in the drugs trade has increased, with the gardaí commencing 75 criminal cases against them in 1996 compared to 196 last year. Some 130 people have lost their lives in gun attacks, gangland or otherwise, since the Guerin murder.
Combined, all of these statistics paint a worrying picture. The Garda Commissioner, Noel Conroy, said recently that containing armed drug gangs now involved so many Garda resources that detection rates for other crime types had fallen slightly.
When Guerin was killed there were a handful of nightclubs in Dublin where recreational drugs could be easily sourced. They are now available in virtually every pub and club in Dublin, and are now almost as readily available outside the capital.
Senior gardaí who spoke to The Irish Times this week say it is killings such as that of Perdue that worry them most.
Like many men of his age gunned down in the last few years, Perdue was a relative unknown in the drugs trade. Gardaí believe he was killed because he owed a small debt or because he had become embroiled in a personal dispute with associates. Others have been killed because their associates believed they were about to become Garda informers. The level of drugs, particularly cocaine, now being consumed by young dealers increases this paranoia and begets more killing.
Unlike 10 years ago, minor disputes are increasingly resulting in the violent deaths of young men. With each killing, the gun culture that until relatively recently had not taken hold in the Republic becomes slightly more entrenched.
In 1999, Mr Justice Frederick Morris presided over the trial of Brian Meehan, the only man currently serving a prison sentence for Veronica Guerin's murder. At Meehan's sentencing Mr Justice Morris said that if many young people could be saved from the scourge of drug abuse as a result of Guerin's murder, her death "will have not been in vain". A decade on, one wonders if Veronica Guerin's murder changed anything. It is easy now to forget the emotion of that time.
THE PICTURES OF her red Opel Calibra covered in plastic sheeting on the Naas Road, with her body still inside, were splashed across every newspaper in the country the day after her murder.
There was an outpouring of national grief that nothing since has even come close to. Thousands of people left bunches of flowers outside Leinster House and lined the streets for the funeral, one of the biggest Dublin has ever seen.
The taoiseach of the day, John Bruton, described the murder as "sinister in the extreme". Pictures of Guerin's seven-year-old son, Cathal, drove home the human cost of the killing. The boy's father, Graham Turley, spoke to broadcaster Seán O'Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1's News At One about the moment he learned of his wife's murder and knew he would have to tell Cathal. Turley recalled that, in his innocence, Cathal asked him questions:
" 'And where did they hit mum?' he said. And I said: 'They hit mum three times around the heart and they hit her in the neck and then there's two bullets still in the car somewhere, they think. They're not exactly sure.'
"And he said: 'Is mum coming home?' And I said: 'No, she's not coming home. But she's going to be here minding us. Because remember, we talked about this before.' 'Oh, I got it,' he says. 'She's with God and she'll be looking down on me and everything I do from now on.' "
This week, Cathal, now a confident and polite 17-year-old, took messages from The Irish Times for his father during a visit and telephone calls to the family home in north Co Dublin. But Turley did not call back. Ten years on, perhaps he has no interest in becoming the story again.
After his wife's shooting the most intense investigation into gangland crime the State had ever seen was embarked upon. Within months, one gang, some of whose members were charged with killing Guerin, had been dismantled (see panel). It had been headed by John Gilligan and included, among others, Brian Meehan, Charles Bowden, Paul Ward, Patrick "Dutchy" Holland and Russell Warren.
The Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab) was established after the killing to dismantle the assets of the Gilligan gang and others. It was the State's direct response to Guerin's shocking murder and is perhaps the only lasting legacy of the killing.
From Cab's statutory inception in October 1996 up to the end of 2004, the value of the assets owned by criminals that were frozen or sold by the bureau amounted to more than €75 million. In the same period, €81.8 million in taxes and interest was demanded, with more than €72.5 million collected.
Gilligan's main asset, the Jessbrook Equestrian Centre in Co Kildare, has been frozen by court order since 1996. However, protracted legal wrangling between Gilligan and Cab means the property has still not been transferred to the ownership of the State and readied for disposal. Sources in Cab insist it is only a matter of time before this happens.
On its inception, Cab drew up a list of 17 target gangs, many of which were successfully brought to book. However, some of the main players on the list simply fled Ireland when they found themselves under unprecedented Garda scrutiny in the aftermath of the Guerin murder.
These men are now based in The Netherlands and Spain. They source drugs from South American gangs and cartels in continental Europe and Asia and send the merchandise to gangs in Ireland. The level of drugs now flooding into the country every week means that, based on its turnover of 10 years ago, John Gilligan's gang would probably not even make it on to a list of Cab's top targets today. It certainly wouldn't top such a list.
Michael McDowell says he has given gardaí all they have asked for in the fight against the gangs. Gardaí say they are doing all they can. The body count, meanwhile, continues to mount, despite the €21.5 million Operation Anvil that gardaí are currently involved in. The operation represents the biggest Garda drive against armed crime since the clampdown immediately after Guerin's murder.
Its budget is being used to enable saturation surveillance and intelligence-gathering focused on known organised crime gangs. But it is clear that when gangs are intent on murder, it is virtually impossible to stop them. Those officers fighting gangland cannot babysit every possible target around the clock.
IT IS HARD to see where answers will come from. Ian O'Donnell, director of the Institute of Criminology at University College Dublin, believes that those looking to blame Michael McDowell for the continued relentless expansion of gangland crime are misguided. He says investment in all strands of the criminal justice system - including the Garda Síochána, the prison system and the judiciary - is at an all-time high.
"If it was a matter of resources, it would be solved by now," he says.
O'Donnell agrees that, as a society, we are reaping what we sow. So many people are now using drugs in every town and city in the country that, as a people, we have created the circumstances in which gangland flourishes all around us.
He believes that the system over which McDowell presides is, in large part, simply mopping up the problems that health and educational agencies have failed to address in the formative years of the men who become killers and victims.
"Most counties in Ireland don't have any gangland killings in a year," he says. "Yet there are pockets, particularly in Dublin, where some suburbs have a number of killings each year. Any garda or social worker will tell you that there are just a few families in these areas causing all the problems. But in many cases these are also the families that have had disadvantage heaped upon them for generations. We have to look outside the criminal justice system to address that."