Gardaí are to target criminals and gangs suspected of being behind a series of murders and armed robberies as part of a major crackdown on armed crime in Dublin.
Operation Anvil, which will last for four months initially and will involve hundreds of uniformed and plainclothes officers and detectives from specialist units, was announced in the Dáil yesterday by Minister for Justice Michael McDowell.
He said it would "strike at the heart of the gun culture which has emerged". He told the Dáil: "The operation will be focused, sustained, targeted and relentless."
Each Garda division in the Dublin Metropolitan Region has identified a list of targets. Some will be placed under intense overt surveillance, similar to that used in the 1980s and 1990s against Dublin criminal Martin Cahill.
Mr McDowell has allocated an additional €6.5 million in funding to finance 15,000 additional hours of overtime a week to operate the city-wide operation. He also said he was considering amendments to criminal justice legislation currently before the Oireachtas, to make it an offence to be a member of a criminal gang, and minimum sentences for firearms possession. Opposition parties welcomed the additional funding, but accused Mr McDowell of ignoring rising levels of armed crime in the capital until it had reached epidemic proportions.
Labour Party justice spokesman Joe Costello said Mr McDowell's "boast last November that the gangs had been broken up was misplaced". Fine Gael justice spokesman Jim O'Keeffe said the measures were "too little, too late".
The last seven weeks have seen seven gun murders, six in Dublin and one in Sligo. The discharging of firearms last year increased by 38 per cent to 290 cases. One senior officer last night said Garda management feared a member of the force would be killed by gangs armed with automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
Detectives have spent months gathering evidence and believe they have identified those behind recent armed robberies and murders.
Operation Anvil will include detailed searches of properties belonging to suspects, while detectives will mount surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations against the suspects. Gardaí will mount armed checkpoints where the suspects live.
Mr McDowell noted "the apparent belief on the part of some criminals that they are not bound by, or subject to, the laws of the land".
"Nobody is above the law and, likewise, nobody is beneath the protection of the law."
He added: "There is a clear pattern of people who in the past were members of paramilitary bodies, now using for their private ends all the thuggish skills they developed and the mercilessness they exhibited, threatening and killing innocent people and shooting people in the head."