The jailing of Liam Keane this week represents a significant victory for gardaí fighting violence in Limerick city, writes CONOR LALLY.
BORN INTO a family whose name is synonymous with gang violence, Liam Keane has in recent years found himself at the centre of the national crime debate, in the thick of Limerick’s feud and a hate figure in the national media.
A heroin addict and son of leading gang boss Chirsty Keane, 24-year-old Keane jnr was jailed for 10 years on Tuesday for possession of a firearm. When found with the loaded 9mm Parabellum Glock semi-automatic pistol in a stolen Mazda RX5 in Corbally, Limerick, last May, he was wearing latex gloves. Prosecuting counsel John O’Sullivan said Keane and a co-accused were clearly about to use the gun for “sinister purposes”.
Judge Carroll Moran was told Keane was wearing gloves to frustrate the gathering of forensic evidence from the weapon. The court also heard nine members of the Emergency Response Unit stopped the stolen car Keane was driving and that the gun had been discharged 14 times in a shooting two weeks earlier.
Keane's arrest was a good catch for gardaí and the severity of the sentence handed down on Tuesday has been welcomed by senior officers who spoke to The Irish Times.
Keane first came to the nation’s attention when he walked free from a collapsed murder trial after several potentially key witnesses suffered what Mr Justice Paul Carney called “a case of collective amnesia”. Six witnesses, some of whom had initially given detailed statements to gardaí identifying Keane as the killer, either refused to answer questions or said they could not remember the murder.
Keane had been charged with the stabbing to death in August 2001 of Eric Leamy (19), on the Lee Estate. Keane, from Singland Gardens in Ballysimon, was aged 17 when the murder occurred. Efforts were made to have the trial in Limerick but so many potential jurors feared for their safety it proved impossible to empanel a jury, forcing the hearing to relocate to Dublin.
When the case collapsed in November 2003 for lack of witnesses, Mr Justice Carney told the jury when discharging them: “The likes of what has happened in this case has never been encountered in this court before.” Keane walked from the Four Courts smoking a cigarette and laughed for the benefit of press photographers while cocking his fingers in the V-sign.
The next morning, front page photographs of a smirking member of one of Limerick’s feuding families walking free from court reinforced the perception that a small number of criminals in the city had become untouchable. The then taoiseach Bertie Ahern at the time said there were people who were “trying to put it up to the Government and the people”.
“We must and will take action against this,” Ahern said in heated exchanges in the Dáil. After a major review of legislation, the Government introduced new provisions to safeguard the admissibility of witness statements even if the people who made them could not, or would not, later stand over them in court.
LIAM KEANE’S FAMILY are well known to gardaí in Limerick. His father Christie Keane (48) is in the last few weeks of a 10-year drugs sentence. His uncle Kieran Keane (36) was shot dead by the notorious rival McCarthy-Dundon drugs gang in January 2003.
Liam Keane’s cousin, Joseph Keane (20) – the son of murdered Kieran Keane – is currently serving seven years for manslaughter. In 2005 he was part of a teenage gang that kicked to death 18-year-old Darren Coughlan after they mistook him for somebody else. When jailed in 2007, he winked and smiled at supporters while being led to a waiting prison van.
Both of the older Keanes were the leading figures on Limerick’s gangland scene. Virtually everyone on the city’s sprawling estates knew them and almost everybody feared them.
Some of the witnesses who suffered amnesia during Liam Keane’s aborted murder trial were later convicted of perjury. When one of them – David Murphy (then 21) from Limerick’s Lee Estate – was being sentenced in 2006, Judge Carroll Moran said he accepted there existed a “regime of fear” in the area where the young Limerick man lived.
Murphy spelt out bluntly in court why he would prefer to go to prison rather than face what he believed were the consequences of giving evidence against Liam Keane. “I can come out of prison but I can’t come out of a box ,” he said.
The day after he walked free from the charge of murdering Eric Leamy, Liam Keane was in trouble again. He failed to appear at Limerick District Court to face charges of being drunk in a public place. He was eventually given a three-month suspended sentence.
Since then he has been frequently before the courts and in the newspapers. On January 6th, 2004, he was jailed for four months for shouting threats at a man and failing to comply with the direction of gardaí during an incident on the steps of Limerick District Court.
In July 2004, less than three months after his release from jail, Keane was back in court in relation to driving a stolen motorbike, being abusive when stopped, failing to supply a breath sample and driving with no tax or insurance.
In April 2005, Keane, by then 20 years of age, appeared in court charged with threatening to kill or cause serious harm to John Leamy, a brother of murder victim Eric Leamy. The charges were later dropped.
In January 2006, Keane was jailed for 18 months after he tried to escape from a pursuing Garda car while drink driving.
In July 2007, he was jailed for another three months for being drunk in a public place and abusing gardaí. On the night in question he was celebrating the failure of the appeals by five members of the McCarthy-Dundon gang against their conviction for the murder of Keane’s uncle, Kieran Keane. One of the men who was with Liam Keane on the night threatened to put a bullet in the head of a garda after he was arrested.
AT A FURTHER COURT case in September 2007, it emerged Keane’s life had spiralled into heroin addiction. He was jailed for 10 months after robbing a €60,000 2007 Audi A4. He had driven the stolen car to an illegal car-racing rally near Roscrea, Co Tipperary, before driving on to Finglas, Dublin, where the Audi was found burnt out. The car was owned by Philip Collopy, a gangland figure closely associated with Liam Keane’s father and his murdered uncle.
Last May, just weeks after his release from prison, Liam Keane hit the headlines again when caught with the gun for which he was jailed on Tuesday.
While being held on remand in prison awaiting trial, he still could not keep out of trouble. A major investigation was begun in Limerick prison last August when it emerged that Keane, who has almost 70 convictions, was using a smuggled phone to take photographs of himself, which he uploaded from his cell on to his page on the Bebo social-networking site. On the site, Keane – who was once stabbed – makes the macabre prediction he will die in a shooting when he is 28 years old.
His imprisonment this week will take him out of circulation until he is 31.