ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN Diarmuid Martin has spoken of his distaste at the ongoing gangland feud being seen in Dublin.
Eight people have been shot dead since the killing of Gary Hutch in Marbella, Spain, in September last year as hostilities between the Kinahan and Hutch families spiralled out of control.
Two of those killings, of Martin O’Rourke in Dublin and Trevor O’Neill in Spain, where cases of mistaken identity.
Speaking to Newstalk’s Today with Pat Kenny, Archbishop Martin said the killings were being perpetrated by “a group of young men who are prepared to kill brutally, in a way that even earlier criminals weren’t”.
“This is all at the service of a group of people who are making enormous amounts of money and flooding our streets with drugs,” he said.
It is a real threat to democracy when you have these people saying ‘we can run this country as we wish and we will decide what happens’.
Martin said that he feels “terribly sorry” for families in areas affected by the violence that have been “vilified”.
“Particularly for the young people in those areas, who will see negativity brought to them for the rest of their lives,” he said.
“These people are not on drugs,” he said of the perpetrators of the recent killings.
They’re sober, cold, and determined to make sure anyone in their way is eliminated. It is only from within that these people will be persuaded to lay down their arms. They’re not afraid of the gardaí.
Martin said that he understands that the scenario “is not one of tit for tat, but where one organisation is far stronger than the other”.
Of the Hutch family, Martin expressed his amazement that a truce had not been declared.
“I can’t understand how an entire family will watch as every one of its members is knocked off one after another and not say to somebody we’ve got to stop this,” he said.
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