Since its inception a year ago, Operation Anvil has put pressure on the gangsters and boosted Garda morale, writes Conor Lally
On a summer's evening in June 2005 a sports car screeches down a back road between Blanchardstown and Finglas in west Dublin. Its occupants, two Ballyfermot drug dealers in their 30s, have just threatened to murder another criminal at his home in Tyrrellstown, Dublin 15, in a row over drugs money.
Leaving the Blanchardstown area, they are happy with their night's work, believing they have escaped undetected. But as their car hurtles between the hedges on to Finglas they unexpectedly happen upon a Garda checkpoint.
They speed through it but are pursued. Panicking, they throw one of their shotguns out the car window near Cappagh hospital. A short time later armed gardaí in back-up vehicles stop the gunmen in their tracks. The detectives pull the men from their vehicle and handcuff them. Another firearm is recovered form their car along with two balaclavas.
The Garda's three-week-old Operation Anvil, targeted at armed Dublin gangs, has just recorded one of its first real successes.
In the months before the setting up of Anvil on May 17th, 2005, it was clear that a fresh approach was needed. There had been an unprecedented eight gun murders in two months, mostly in Dublin. Armed gangs based in the capital had stolen in the region of €6 million cash from security vans in less than six months. Perhaps most worrying of all were the fears being expressed privately by senior gardaí that the very significant sums of money being stolen were being invested in drugs and firearms by gangs looking to establish themselves as major gangland players.
Their fears were confirmed when gardaí investigating the robbery of €2.3 million from a Securicor van in March 2005 discovered that a six-figure portion of the takings had been invested in drugs by the gang within days of the robbery.
Two weeks later €2.2 million was robbed by an armed gang that hijacked a Brinks Allied van at a petrol station in Artane, Dublin.
WHEN MINISTER FOR Justice Michael McDowell took to his feet in the Dáil on May 17th he was a man under pressure. Gangland, the Opposition shouted, was out of control. McDowell rarely misses an opportunity to chastise Opposition parties about their record on crime when in office. But this time he conceded some of the points being made by his rivals.
"A feature of the gun culture which has emerged is the apparent belief on the part of some criminals that they are not bound by or subject to the laws of the land," he told the Dáil.
He hit back with Operation Anvil. Some €6.5 million in ring-fenced funding was set aside allowing gardaí in flashpoint Dublin suburbs to work up to 15,000 hours of overtime per week. (A further €15 million has since been committed.) Additional high-visibility mobile and foot patrols have operated, along with random checkpoints.
The National Surveillance Unit was drafted in to covertly and overtly monitor members of armed gangs. A number of other specialist units were also to be involved, including the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the Emergency Response Unit, the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation.
"The aim was to literally sit on these guys and make it very hard or impossible for them to operate," says one Garda source.
"It's very hard to say how successful it has been," says another, "because the big thing was to prevent armed gangs from acting. And it's always difficult to measure things that you've prevented."
Another garda comments: "Some drug dealers were looked at so closely that they went broke or close to it. It was impossible for them to move drugs around because even the smaller guys, the foot soldiers, were getting stopped at checkpoints."
The same detective says the additional resources have also boosted morale.
"Young gardaí have been out there doing the business head-to-head with some serious criminals. There has just been a great buzz around the place."
THE GREATLY INCREASED level of activity is borne out in the latest Operation Anvil figures, to April 23rd, supplied by the Department of Justice. Since its inception officers working on Anvil have made 2,028 arrests. More than 11,000 searches have been carried out: 9,175 for drugs, 837 for firearms and 1,005 theft-related. Some 505 illegally held firearms have been seized along with 4,410 vehicles that were either stolen or should not have been on the road. The number of checkpoints established has reached 28,105 and the value of stolen property recovered has now reached almost €8 million.
But despite this level of garda activity it hasn't all been plain sailing. Just 10 days after Operation Anvil was announced Tony Creed (36) was shot dead in the bedroom of his home in Clondalkin, Dublin. He was a known drug dealer who had clashed with local men in the weeks before his murder.
Eleven more gun murders have followed in Dublin since then, an average of almost one per month. In recent weeks major attacks on cash in transit vans have surfaced once again. This follows a near-complete cessation of such activity for almost a year. On March 28th a gang used a stolen JCB to ram a cash in transit van at Donaghmede shopping centre, Dublin, escaping with €600,000.
Less than a week later, on April 2nd, a lone gunman hijacked an unmarked 4x4 vehicle delivering cash to ATMs in Clondalkin village, Dublin. More than €800,000 was taken. And on April 6th a Brinks Allied vehicle managed to speed to safety as raiders tried to ram it in Killester, Dublin.
Some Garda sources say all gangland activity can never be stopped. They insist Anvil has succeeded in putting gangs under pressure and preventing even more murders and drug dealing than Dublin has witnessed in the last 12 months.
While plans to expand Operation Anvil into the regions were revealed by The Irish Times this week, some gardaí who spoke to this newspaper have complained the operation in Dublin has been scaled back of late.
This week Mr McDowell introduced to the media the new chief inspector of the Garda Inspectorate, Kathleen O'Toole. The former Boston police chief noted how Irish society was changing and was now facing the kind of gang activity seen in the US for many years.
One of her first tasks will be to examine if the level of resourcing within An Garda Síochána is sufficient to meet the new challenges. Gardaí in many north and south-west Dublin suburbs, where armed gangs are most established, will await her conclusions with interest.