Dublin gang killings '˜being directed from overseas'

After the latest victim in a bloody feud was gunned down close to the capital’s main thoroughfare, the Taoiseach suggested a crackdown was being hampered because offshore crime bosses were behind the hits.

Listing off a macabre roll call of some of the country’s most murderous crime gangs in the past, he said they were all based within Ireland and could be targeted at a national level.

“At least in those cases in different years, those criminal gangs were based here in Ireland,” he said. “There is now a very strong international connection here, where hits are ordered from abroad and where this is as much about sending signals internationally about the so-called status of criminal gangs as it is about power, money and misery here.

“Those sent to carry out the killings or attempted killings – for in some cases very small sums – are really signals from those who live with the trappings of wealth and shallowness of wealth abroad and do their dirty business from abroad.”

Gareth Hutch, who was in his 30s and the father of a young son, was shot dead on Tuesday morning a few hundred yards from bustling O’Connell Street.

A nephew of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch, he is believed to be the seventh victim of a violent dispute between the Kinahan and Hutch families.