GERRY ‘THE MONK’ Hutch returned to Ireland this week to register as a candidate in the Dublin Central constituency for the upcoming general election, bringing even more attention to an already highly contested race for a Dáil seat.
A notorious gangland figure believed by gardaí to be the leader of the Hutch organised crime group, Hutch was arrested and charged in Lazarote by Spanish police investigating alleged organised crime activity last month.
He was released on €100,000 bail last week and registered his candidacy yesterday, giving his profession as “consultant”.
Despite being one of the most high-profile figures in Irish organised crime for decades, he has never been convicted of serious offences. He did, however, pay more than two million pounds to the Criminal Assets Bureau and his name is synonymous with one of the deadliest gangland feuds in Irish history.
Hutch is running as an independent candidate and with four seats up for grabs, he has some high-profile competition, including Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and Fine Gael TD Paschal Donohoe.
Gerard Hutch was born in 1963, the youngest of a family of eight in Dublin’s north inner city. The Hutches eventually settled in the Summerhill area.
His father, known as ‘Masher’ Hutch was a stevedore on the Dublin docks and his mother Julia raised the children.
He came from what he has described as an impoverished background and started his criminal career early as a member of an infamous teenage street gang known as the Bugsy Malones.
Their crimes were focused on handbag thefts, car break-ins and other acts of small-time larceny.
His first prison sentence came at the age of 15, but he also spent time in industrial schools for other offences.
In a 2008 interview with RTÉ, Hutch said of his teenage prison time: “I’ll agree I done wrong, but I think the severity of being put into Mountjoy Prison at that age, it was like going to college for criminals.”
As he grew into adulthood, his focus shifted to more high-end robberies and burglaries.
Hutch was regarded as the organiser of the robbery of £1.7 million from a Securicor cash-in-transit van in Marino Mart in 1987.
But it was the infamous 1995 Brinks Allied robbery at the company’s depot in Clonshaugh, in north Dublin, that brought him into the public spotlight.
During that raid, a gang – using militaristic efficiency – entered the site with a makeshift bridge over a ditch and stole £3 million, one of the biggest ever robberies in Ireland at that time.
Garda focus on Hutch began to ramp up following that raid, but his efforts to avoid direct links to his alleged crimes had meant charges were unlikely.
It was around this time that the media began to refer to Hutch as ‘The Monk’, mostly due to the apparently quiet lifestyle he led.
In 1997, the newly formed Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) had Hutch’s property and wealth in its sights and brought a case to the High Court seeking a multimillion pound settlement against him.
Hutch was wealthy by then, having invested in a portfolio of property, including a house in Clontarf.
In High Court evidence, CAB claimed Hutch was the leader of a criminal gang and that they were responsible for cash robberies totalling more than £4 million.
Hutch told the court that he had no money to pay and that his legal fees would be covered by selling properties.
CAB alleged he had invested much of the proceeds of his criminal activities in property and hid money under the names of associates in offshore accounts.
In the end, Hutch agreed to pay CAB over £2 million in outstanding tax in 2000.
In the years that followed, Hutch became involved in a number of business ventures, including a luxury limousine service called Carry Any Body, or CAB.
In more recent years, the Hutch name became more commonly associated with a deadly feud between the Hutch organised crime group and the Kinahan organised crime group.
The feud had its roots in the relationship between Gerard Hutch’s nephew Gary Hutch and the Kinahans.
Gary Hutch allegedly became involved with the Kinahan gang, using money from a tiger kidnapping to invest in a drug shipment.
That investment never came to fruition and Gary Hutch sought to exact revenge in a botched shooting.
An attempt to absolve Gary Hutch of the shooting involved the Hutches paying a reported six-fugure sum to the Kinahans, but the Hutches were double crossed and Gary Hutch was murdered by his former friend James ‘Frizzy’ Quinn in Spain in September 2015.
Quinn is now serving a 22-year sentence in a Spanish jail.
What followed was a shooting at the Regency Hotel in February 2016, when gunmen stormed a boxing weigh-in – three of the attackers were disguised as gardaí and another man was disguised as a woman.
The intended target was reportedly Daniel Kinahan, who was at the event but escaped. The assassins instead shot dead one of Kinahan’s associates, 34-year-old Crumlin man David Byrne.
Gerard Hutch escaped to Lanzarote following the Regency shooting and was eventually arrested by Spanish authorities in 2021.
The feud ignited by the Regency attack led to eighteen people being killed, including some innocent victims not involved in organised crime. Many of those killed with Hutch family members and associates. The last major incident in the feud occurred in March 2019.
Gerard Hutch was found not guilty of David Byrne’s murder but his two co-accused, Paul Murphy (61), of Cherry Avenue, Swords, Co Dublin and Jason Bonney (50), of Drumnigh Wood, Portmarnock, Dublin 13, were found guilty of participating in or contributing to the murder by providing access to motor vehicles.
He was then seen walking the streets of Dublin a free man, mobbed by reporters and photographers. He then returned to Lanzarote.
In October 2024, Gerard Hutch was arrested by police in Spain following searches at ten locations targeting assets suspected to be owned by members of the Hutch gang.
Hutch was charged on the island of Lanzarote and then released on bail on 4 November. The Dubliner, according to the court, was “being investigated as the alleged perpetrator of a money laundering offence committed in the context of a criminal organisation”.
He has since returned to Ireland to run in the general election scheduled for 29 November.
Hutch has not revealed what issues he plans to make the focus of his campaign, but he has been interviewed in an upcoming episode of the Crime World with Nicola Tallant podcast due to be released on Sunday.
Mary Lou McDonald said yesterday that she “absolutely condemns” Hutch.
“There’s nobody more on record than I in condemning Hutch,” said McDonald.
“I represent the communities that suffer because of this so-called gangland warfare, I represent communities that have suffered the ravages of the heroin epidemic from the 1980s and all of the chapters thereafter.”
Taoiseach Simon Harris said that Hutch should not be treated like a “minor celebrity”.
“This is the person who’s brought misery and criminality to this capital city. He’s not a celebrity, he’s a criminal.”
Also running in Dublin Central are Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, Fine Gael TD Paschal Donohoe, former independent MEP Clare Daly, Social Democrat TD Gary Gannon, Labour Senator Marie Sherlock, Green Party TD Nease Hourigan, Sinn Féin councillor Janice Boylan, Fianna Fáil Senator Mary Fitzpatrick, the Centre Party’s Andrew Kelly, People Before Profit’s Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Independent councillor Malachy Steenson and Áontú’s Ian Noel Smyth.
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