Abbey-Duniry man reveals how Garda operation cracked Galway crime gang

A MEETING in Galway Garda Station between four senior members of the force – one of them a Detective Inspector from South Galway – on a September’s day back in 2009 sowed the seeds for an historic conviction in relation to the tackling of organised crime in Ireland last week.

The meeting between Assistant Commissioner, John O’Mahony; Chief Superintendent, Donal Ó Cualáin; Superintendent Tom Curley and Detective Inspector Gerry Roche, had a very clear goal as regards serious crime in the city and Galway region.

Although Galway wasn’t generally categorised as being in the same league as Limerick and Dublin in the gangland crime league, there were various snippets of information filtering back to Gardai of more organised criminal activity beginning to take root in the West.

The strategy agreed at that meeting, was that ‘the time was now’ to nip in the bud the formation of the gangs, in the context of Galway city being the major urban area in the West and consequently a natural focal point for organised crime to get a foothold.

Already in place were all the tried and trusted conventional information gathering techniques, used by the Gardai and police forces all over the world, but earlier that Summer, a new piece of legislation passed through the Oireachtas.

The legislation was designed to allow the Gardai to take the initiative against organised crime. The Criminal Justice (Surveillance) Act, 2009, enabled Gardai – with authorisation from a District Court Judge – to watch and listen into people they suspected of being involved in serious crime.

These were the leaders in the background, those never in the frontline of crime, who provided the organisation and intelligence for the criminal foot soldiers to do their work on the ground. Those were also the people who got richer and richer from every successful criminal operation and usually never got caught.

Back in the Autumn of 2009, Gardai knew that more and more criminal ‘jobs’ were tending to be organised and following a meeting of their ‘top brass’, Operation Foolscap was put in place – a painstaking, labour intensive and new method of, not only keeping track on suspected criminals, but also building up evidence on them that would be admissible in a court of law.

The man on the ground charged with leading and co-ordinating Operation Foolscap was Abbey-Duniry native, Gerry Roche, a Detective Inspector with a long record of dealing with the most heinous of crimes in the Galway area.

Last week at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, following a solid two and a half years of what has been described as ‘tedious, monotonous and labour intensive’ work, Gardai were rewarded for their efforts, with the conviction of two brothers for participating in the activities of a criminal gang between February 10 and June 1, 2010. It was the first conviction of its kind in Ireland.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.