Three days after a gang of six men in police uniforms and balaclavas stormed the Regency Hotel in Dublin and shot up the weigh-ins for a boxing match scheduled to take place the next night, killing one man and critically injuring two others, a splinter faction of the Irish Republican Army paramilitary group has claimed credit for the ambush, further muddying the waters of a case that has so far stumped a stunned and undermanned Dublin police department and showing once again how deep and tangled run the ties between boxing and the criminal underworld in Ireland.
Not long after the squad of masked hitmen with assault rifles had vanished from the crime scene Friday, police in Dublin said they were focusing their investigation on long-running disputes between two of the city’s many drug gangs. After all, the man killed in the shooting, David Byrne, was a reputed lieutenant in the feared trafficking gang the Kinahan Mob, which, it has been rumored, was responsible for the murder last September of Gary Hutch, nephew of famed mob boss Gerry “The Monk” Hutch, in Costa del Sol, Spain, a “second home” for Irish gangsters in exile. After Hutch’s murder, Dublin police informants said his friends were planning revenge against the leader of the Kinahan Mob, Christy Kinahan, and since Saturday’s event event was being co-promoted by the Mob’s “adopted” boxing gym, Costa del Sol’s Macklin’s Gym Marbella, police naturally assumed Friday’s attack was a gangland hit, an act of retaliation for the murder of Gary Hutch and the inevitable and bloody result of living lives outside the law. Even without suspects in custody, things seemed cut and dry. And then the Irish Republican Army came calling.
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Earlier today a spokesman for the Continuity IRA (a nationalist faction that broke off from the Provisional IRA after the ceasefire of 1994 turned the infamous paramilitary group into a weapon-less political party) told the BBC that the killing of Byrne was actually retaliation for the death of Alan Ryan, a member of the Real IRA (a different dissident republican faction that split off from the Provisional IRA) who was killed during a feud with the drug gangs back in 2012. Authorities say the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA, for all their claims to ideological purity, have been involved in extorting money from major drug dealers in Ireland for years.
“Although not a member of our organization, we are not going to stand back and allow drug dealers and criminals to target republicans,” the IRA spokesman said in a prepared statement to the BBC. And with that, the attack on the Regency Hotel and the murder of David Byrne had been dragged into a dark world of political vigilantism and violent nationalism. And stuck in the middle was the Irish boxing scene, where things probably couldn’t be murkier or more hopeless than they are.
If you don’t believe me, consider this: The man on the scales when the shooting started on Friday afternoon was Dublin lightweight Jamie Kavanagh, who was scheduled to take on Portuguese boxer Antonio Joao Bento for the WBO European lightweight title at the next day’s now-unfortunately-named Clash of the Clans event. Though no gangster himself, Kavanagh is the son of Gerald “Hatchet” Kavanagh, a former enforcer for—you guessed it—the Kinahan Mob who was murdered in September 2014 in—right again—Costa del Sol.
In other words, the ties between boxing and the criminal underworld in Dublin run so deep that they’re starting to choke the city’s combat sports scene at the roots. One can only imagine how hard it is to try and make it as a professional boxer in the best of circumstances. Add in the threat of gang violence, drug wars, paramilitary vigilantism, historical resentments, and the fear of getting murdered lousing up your already lousy weight-cut, and the whole business starts to seem not quite worth the risk.
By the way, anyone hoping Friday’s melee was merely an aberration will be disheartened, though probably not surprised, by the IRA’s promise of further repercussions. “This will not be an isolated incident,” the Continuity IRA spokesman told the BBC. “Continuity IRA units have been authorized to carry out further operations. More drug dealers and criminals will be targeted.” And with them the whole Irish boxing scene.
