A Limerick gang's readiness to use rocket-propelled grenade launchers is a serious new development, writes Barry Roche.
While handguns and even assault rifles have been used before by rival Limerick drugs gangs, the news that one side was planning to use rocket-propelled grenade launchers is a serious new development in a feud noted for its casual and reckless use of violence.
Gardaí believe the mini-arsenal seized in Cork was destined for one of the two main gangs whose feuding over drugs in Limerick over the past seven years has at times threatened to escalate into a continuous series of tit-for-tat killings.
The bitterness and hatred is mutual and since 2000 the feud between the McCarthy Dundons and the Ryans on the one side, and the Keanes and Collopsy on the other, has seen attempts at car bombs and other explosive devices being used and sometimes foiled as gardaí seek to prevent the killing from spiralling into double figures.
The murders have been well-documented - Eddie Ryan gunned down in the Moose Bar in November 2000; Kieran Keane shot in an execution-style killing in Drombanna in January 2003; and John Ryan shot in a drive-by shooting in Thomondgate in July 2003.
Others to die in violence related to the feud include Michael Campbell McNamara, an associate of the Keanes, who was shot execution-style in Southill in October 2003 and Fat Frankie Ryan, who associated with the McCarthy Dundons and was killed last September as he sat in a car in Pineview Gardens in Moyross.
Last year too saw five-year-old Jordan Crawford shot in the leg at his home in Southill in a shooting related to the feud. His uncle Noel - who had no involvement in criminal activity - was also shot dead last year outside his parents' house at O'Malley Park, Southill, because of another family member's association with one of the gangs.
Already noted for resorting to violence, the gangs showed just how reckless they are about their own safety and those of others when one group began firing at a member of a rival gang during a 4km chase on the Ennis Dual Carriageway during busy lunch hour traffic on January 12th last.
At this stage, the background to the dispute is almost incidental so deeply ingrained is the hatred and hostility, but underlying it all is drugs and controlling the lucrative market for cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis in the city and elsewhere.
So successful and brutal have the Limerick gangs become that they are now among the major suppliers into several country towns in Munster, while gardaí believe one of the Limerick gangs controls supplies of cocaine into the northside of Cork city.
Gardaí believe it was the development of these Cork links that prompted one of the feuding gangs to try and bring in this latest batch of weaponry through Cork to give them the upper hand in their ongoing turf war for drugs with their equally ruthless rivals.