More than nine years after the outbreak of a bloody feud between the Hutch and Kinahan criminal gangs, a sequence of events over the past week in several different jurisdictions suggests that significant progress is now being made in the fight against the scourge of organised crime.
On Monday, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee travelled to Abu Dhabi to sign an extradition agreement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The first test of the UAE’s genuine willingness to commit to extraditions to Ireland will be the case of senior Kinahan associate Sean McGovern. He was arrested at his Dubai home three weeks ago on foot of an Irish extradition warrant, predating the signing of the new treaty.
The development, which follows months of discussions between the Government and authorities in the UAE, also raises the possibility that Christopher Kinahan and his sons Daniel and Christopher jnr, the leaders of Ireland’s largest criminal cartel, might no longer be safe in their Dubai base from prosecution in Ireland.
On Tuesday, Thomas “Bomber” Kavanagh and Liam Byrne, who ran the Kinahan operations in Britain and Ireland, were sentenced to six and five years respectively in London.
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The following day a Garda search of the Clontarf home of Gerard Hutch, leader of the gang that bears his name, was followed by Hutch’s arrest in Lanzarote. On Friday, Hutch was remanded in custody on charges of money laundering.
The week’s events suggest the international effort to push back against this country’s most powerful criminals is bearing fruit. The current phase of that effort dates back to the original Kinahan-Hutch feud, when the murders of 18 people over a short period of time was seen correctly as a challenge to the authority of the State. That led to unprecedented levels of co-operation at inter-governmental level, including sanctions imposed by the US against Kinahan gang members.
Legal experts counsel caution on whether the new extradition agreement will be successfully applied in the case of the Kinahans. It remains to be seen what charges might be laid against them by the Irish authorities, and how those might be viewed by a court in the UAE. But there is a definite sense of the net tightening.
Organised crime is both a social blight and a global business. It preys ruthlessly on the young and vulnerable, ravages the State’s most marginalised communities and seeks to corrupt civil society in pursuit of power and profit. These recent events vividly illustrate the transnational nature of the problem, and the necessity for governments across the world to co-operate against it. For decades, criminals have successfully exploited weaknesses and loopholes that exist in international law to evade prosecution. Those loopholes, it appears, are finally being closed.