The long arch of Gerard Hutch’s public profile reached another strange peak in recent days, when he arrived in the RDS Election 24 Count Centre moments before he was finally excluded from the running for a seat in the Dáil.
Initially appearing eager to engage with the media, he turned silent when asked questions about his criminal past.
Barry Cummins has covered the activities of ‘The Monk’ for decades. Here, he writes about the outstanding questions that remain for the man who nearly became a Dublin Central TD.
It was just minutes after he walked free from the Special Criminal Court that Gerard Hutch asked me for my contact details.
I was walking a few feet ahead of him as he made his way down the interior back stairs of the Criminal Courts of Justice – ‘tailing’ him, from the front – keeping a close eye on which way he might go.
My job, along with fellow RTÉ colleagues, was to ensure that we got footage of Gerard Hutch walking free from the court building. It was the 17th April 2023, and a working day I’ll remember forever. Over the previous hours I had listened throughout the day as the lengthy verdict of the Special Criminal Court had found Gerard Hutch not guilty of the murder of David Byrne at the Regency Hotel in February 2016.
Like so many journalists, and indeed many of the wider public, I had some questions. Mr Hutch had not given evidence in his own defence – and based on the verdict, you could say it turned out he hadn’t needed to. But the court had heard evidence which referred to the movement of three AK47 weapons used in the Regency attack.
In the weeks after the murder of David Byrne, Gardaí had placed a listening device in the car of Jonathan Dowdall, who would later admit helping a gang which committed the murder. In many hours of secret recordings that Gardaí had obtained, there was one day where Gerard Hutch had been in Dowdall’s vehicle for a journey from Dublin to the North and back.
On that journey there had been much discussion between Dowdall and Hutch of ‘yokes’, which the court was told referred to the AK47s. These discussions had been recorded weeks after the Regency attack.
I wanted to ask Gerard Hutch about his knowledge of the ‘yokes’, what was the purpose of his travel to the North with Jonathan Dowdall to meet a number of dissident Republicans in the aftermath of the Regency attack, and what did he have to say about his own defence teams suggestion that evidence in the case might be suggestive of criminality, but certainly not of murder.
Any such discussion, if ever it was to be had, would have been in the context that Gerard Hutch is not guilty of the murder of David Byrne. That was the verdict of the three Judge court. But the court had also heard evidence of the Hutch Organised Crime Gang, which was described as a fluid type organisation.
I wanted to ask Gerard Hutch questions in the context of him being a prominent individual who made a settlement of over one million pounds with the Criminal Assets Bureau in 2000.
I wanted to ask Gerard Hutch about what had happened to involve him in meeting with Daniel Kinahan in 2014/2015 in what Mr Hutch believed was a meeting to settle a dispute between Gary Hutch and the Kinahans.
Despite Gerard Hutch’s intervention as a mediator, his nephew Gary was shot dead in 2015 in Spain, and then just months later the Hutch gang targeted David Byrne at the Regency in what was an attempt to target Daniel Kinahan, who fled the hotel uninjured.
The subsequent retaliation by the Kinahan gang led to many murders in Dublin, and beyond, including an innocent Irish man gunned down in Majorca.
I wanted to ask Gerard Hutch about his thoughts about how members of his family were targeted in 2016, including his brother Eddie, shot dead just days after the Regency attack, and I wanted to ask him his thoughts about innocent man Noel Kirwan, murdered simply for having attended Eddie’s funeral and been seen in Gerard’s company.
So many questions, but in those moments walking at speed down the back stairs of the court I was just ‘keeping sketch’ from the front.
I knew Gerard Hutch was close behind me, walking with members of his legal team. I sensed two newspaper journalists close behind them. I opened a door onto the second floor which led to the restaurant area of the court building. I was on the phone to a Prime Time producer, Sally Anne Godson, who was outside the building.
As I held the stairwell door open – I sensed it was Gerard Hutch coming next and he took hold of the door. I moved on a few feet, not talking to him, but making eye contact for a moment. Then he gestured to me, a beckoning movement, what I’d call a ‘come here’.
I hung up the call, and looked at him. “Here, give us your number,” is what he said to me. I don’t carry business cards – I’ve meant to get them for years and never got around to it – and in those few seconds I scrambled to get a pen and paper. A group of around a dozen people were now gathered at a table near the restaurant till.
I grabbed a sheet of paper and Hutch’s solicitor gave me a pen. I didn’t say anything, but I wrote my number – in big writing and legibly. I went to hand it directly to Gerard Hutch who was standing right in front of me, but his solicitor took it. “Right,” said the man often referred to as ‘The Monk’, looking me in the eye again for a second, and then he turned away, followed by his legal team and a larger group which had by now made it down the back stairs.
I went ahead towards the front of the building and watched as Gerard Hutch walked down to the centre of the building’s foyer. Sunday World reporter Nicola Tallant went over to him and spoke with him briefly. He seemed to gesture as if he was going to walk out the front door, and then he did.
I was knocked over by a number of colleagues as I knelt in front of the moving mass of media scrum. I should have known better, but I was trying to keep close to the recently released man. Gerard Hutch had arrived at the court earlier that day in a prison convoy amid high security. He had spent 20 months in custody, taking the time to grow a long beard and hair. Now he was about to walk out of court.
Members of the Garda team which had investigated The Regency had walked out of court a few moments before. That day they had seen two other men – Paul Murphy and Jason Bonney – being convicted of being getaway drivers for members of the gang that struck at the Regency.
In an ironic twist, both Murphy and Bonney had been on bail until being convicted, so they had walked into court that day from the public street. Now they were in custody, and the man who had arrived in custody was walking free.
Gerard Hutch came down the steps of the court building and turned left. Swamped by media, he never once lost his composure. I picked myself up from being momentarily put to the ground by the media scrum and caught up as Hutch walked down the steps onto the footpath.
A passer-by latched onto him and tried to tell media to leave him alone – in a recent podcast with Nicola Tallant after announcing his election bid – Gerard Hutch jokingly called the man who intervened to help him as ‘Kevin Costner’, in a nod to the film ‘The Bodyguard’.
Gerard Hutch didn’t say a word when he emerged onto the street and walked up Infirmary Road.
More than one Garda has remarked to me since that day, that the only people breaking the law that day were journalists who were out on the road blocking traffic. I was one of them, caught up in a moment which was surreal.
I was videoing Gerard Hutch as he walked one way, then another. He was looking for a taxi, which his solicitor had ordered. The solicitor called out to Hutch to show where the taxi was caught in a traffic jam, where the gathered motorists must have wondered what was going on.
And then Gerard Hutch was gone. I know he got my number from his solicitor. I know he took that scribbled page with him as he headed home to Clontarf.
He never rang – if he had, I had many questions.
I would have asked him about his thoughts when Spanish police arrested him in a restaurant in Fuengirola in August 2021. I would have asked him where he had been in the months prior to that, ever since the Special Criminal Court had issued a warrant for his arrest to stand trial for the murder of David Byrne.
I would have asked him about the suspicions that remain that someone had tipped him off that an arrest warrant had been issued.
I would have asked him about what brought him to be in a car back in 2016 chatting with Jonathan Dowdall about ‘yokes’. To be fair, Dowdall did most of the chatting, but what was Gerard Hutch doing on two trips to the North?
Gerard Hutch has spoken to the media more than once. Back in 2008 he sat down with RTÉ’s Crime Correspondent Paul Reynolds who grilled him about many matters, including the source of his wealth, and unsolved security van robberies.
Gerard Hutch maintained his wealth came from a compensation payment wisely invested in property. He maintained his settlement with the Criminal Assets Bureau was a ‘tax’ settlement.
Yesterday as he arrived at the count centre at the RDS, Hutch declined to speak with Paul Reynolds who wanted to ask him about the Special Criminal Court, and those questions which still remain.
Gerard Hutch indicated a disdain for RTÉ in his response yesterday so I don’t think I’ll be getting a call from him anytime soon. But just like Paul Reynolds, and many other journalists, I still have questions.
Recently Gerard Hutch spoke to the Crime World podcast hosted by Nicola Tallant. And he spoke with many members of the public as he campaigned in Dublin Central in advance of last Friday’s general election.
He’s certainly been busy, so maybe that’s why he never called me. My number hasn’t changed, and the phone is always charged. But Gerard Hutch’s world has changed considerably in the year and half since he said to me “here, give us your number”.
