Newspaper Watch: Jim Cusack - rewriting criminal history

To mark the tenth anniversary of Veronica Geurin's murder, Jim Cusack, writing in the Sunday Independent, produced a potted history of organised crime in the last decade. His article, entitled 'IRA crime godfathers are winning drugs war', argued that the Gardaí and the Criminal Assets Bureau had been initially successful in tackling the problem: "in the two or three years after Veronica's murder drugs importation was disrupted and gangland killing almost became a thing of the past". However, by the turn of the millenium "the IRA was in on Dublin crime and would have a profound affect on its resurgence".

Unfortunately for Cusack, this theory is contradicted by much of his own writing. In the period in question he worked as the Irish Times security correspondent. On 16 December 1996, less than six months after Guerin's murder, in an article entitled 'Dublin's gangsters have got the killing habit', he declared that "the city is experiencing yet another round of killings over drugs money". On 10 November 1997 he announced that "drug smuggling appears to be on the rise again as new gangs seek to enter the massively profitable market".

A few weeks later, reporting on the killing of Dublin drug-dealer Tony "Chester" Beatty, he warned that "this murder might mark the beginning of another round of gangland killings in the city". A year later, on 5 December 1998, he noted that "there have been at least 20 shooting incidents in Dublin during the year and most are believed to involve drug gang members shooting at each other".

Then on 3 May 2000, he told us that "In the past 18 months there has been evidence of increased organised crime with an associated increase in killings and gun attacks" with "17 murders related to crime or republican paramilitary activity in the past 20 months".

Cusack's claims about patterns of gangland crime rest upon the number of gangland killings per 20 months. However, there are no reliable statistics maintained for "gangland killings" and Garda murder statistics show no statistically significant decrease in the number of murders in the wake of Guerin's murder. As for the theory of a recent resurgence: while the 54 recorded murders in 2005 was the highest in the past decade, the 37 murders in 2004 was the lowest.

The notion that the IRA is particularly linked to recent gangland activity is on even shakier ground. Cusack's article acknowledged that there is "no hard evidence that the IRA became directly involved in large-scale drug dealing".

However, Cusack claimed that, by assassinating the competition, the IRA has given a "free run in supplying the lucrative drug market" to criminals who pay for their protection. No evidence was supplied in support of this theory, and the killings that Cusack linked to this IRA strategy – Joseph Foran, Seamus Hogan and Thomas Byrne – all took place in 2000 and 2001. Moreover, at the time of the killings, Cusack wrote that, rather than being a strategy to take control of the drugs trade, they were part of an anti-drugs campaign. In May 2000 he wrote that: "the IRA's shootings of drug dealers in Dublin is an extension of its practice in Northern Ireland. Since the first IRA ceasefire in 1994, the IRA has killed at least 10 men on suspicion of drug dealing."p