How should we feel about Virgin Media airing an interview with John Gilligan, the drug dealer and gangland figure? Minister for Justice Helen McEntee doesn’t seem keen – she said she wouldn’t be watching Confessions of a Crime Boss (Virgin Media One, Monday, 10pm). Minister of State Hildegarde Naughton, who is responsible for the Government’s national drugs strategy, shares that opinion. “I don’t think the producers have exercised particularly good judgment by giving John Gilligan the opportunity to speak about his actions on national television,” she said.
The worry with Confessions of a Crime Boss is that it will sanitise Gilligan, who speaks in the programme about the death, in 1996, of Veronica Guerin, the crime reporter whose murder he was tried for. In fact Gilligan doesn’t come out well. He seems smirking and shifty. And there are flashes of something more unpleasant. When Guerin’s killing is brought up in an early clip, he shrugs. “If you go into the kitchen and get burned, don’t start crying.”
Virgin Media has three episodes to fill, so these interviews, conducted in Gilligan’s home on the Costa Blanca in Spain in late 2022 and early 2023, are padded out. The focus in part one is his early life. He grew up in a hard-knock household in Ballyfermot, in Dublin, his father a violent criminal. “I hit him,” Gilligan says of his relationship with his father. “I stop him hitting my mother and my sisters.”
He had an affinity for crime. When a milkman drove Gilligan and some friends to a summer camp, they stole his milk. Having taken a job working on the ferries, Gilligan supplemented his income with robberies in Britain. He went on to build a career raiding banks.
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Prison held no fear. “None of them are smart – a lot of them are lucky, a bit cute,” says the former Garda assistant commissioner Michael O’Sullivan, one of a number of talking heads who appraise Gilligan’s rise in the context of his times. “Jail was an occupational hazard. There was no shame among criminals about going to prison.”
Everything changed when drugs came along. Gilligan cornered the market in cannabis, which he says he regarded as harmless. “I don’t like heroin. I didn’t believe cannabis is a gateway drug. I know heroin destroys people. I would never sell heroin.”
Gilligan, who left a Spanish court a free man on Monday after striking a deal with prosecutors on drug and weapons charges, sounds as if he’s trying to justify his actions. Whatever about the rights and wrongs of broadcasting the interview, most viewers will probably agree that Gilligan cuts a dreary figure. “I’m sorry I went into crime. I’m not very sorry for the things I done. It doesn’t stop me sleeping,” is as close as he comes to an apology.
There is nothing impressive about Gilligan. He has no aura. He isn’t insightful about his crimes or the social conditions that formed him. He doesn’t tell a good story. He comes across as banal and drab. Confessions of a Crime Boss gets one thing right, then: it is a film made in its subject’s dismal image.
