Gunmen muscling in on boxing are a stain on the sport and all of Ireland
WHEN Katie Taylor’s Irish manager said Dublin “is not conducive” to hosting a fight night by Ireland’s best-known international sportswoman, it left those of us with only a passing interest in the “sport” slightly puzzled.
Was this a ploy because the Bray boxer could earn bigger purses in London, New York or some other international destination? Or was it something deeper being left unsaid?
Is Dublin regarded as unsafe for one of Ireland’s best-known sports personalities – up there with Rory McIlroy and Conor McGregor?
Yesterday’s early morning murder of one man and the shooting of Katie Taylor’s father Pete and another man at the Bray Boxing Club, certainly indicates the undercurrent of extreme violence associated with the periphery of boxing is viewed as a real threat by those who look after the interests of the Irish WBA/IBF world lightweight champion.
Taylor’s handlers have every right to be apprehensive about the aura of danger that currently surrounds boxing in the Irish capital.
“We had talks recently with the powers that be and they advised us that the climate is not conducive to having a fight night (in Dublin),” Taylor’s manager Brian Peters said on May 3. “It’s very tricky, really, to get into it,” he continued. “We still hope to fight here, but if you want to run a show there are the sanctioning bodies, the Garda – there are a whole load of boxes you have to tick.”
One of these unticked boxes, it seems, is that the promoters behind the sport don’t feel Dublin is a safe place to stage an international boxing contest at this particular juncture. Commentators even suggested such a fight night might not be able to get insurance cover because of the associated danger.
This is not a problem for Taylor, who can fight anywhere in the world and draw the crowds, but it is more than just embarrassing for Ireland.
It indicates there is a cabal associated with the sport beyond the reach of our security forces. That in itself is dangerous situation and one the authorities cannot allow to fester.
This latest threat needs to be met with hard-hitting measures. Just as the State reacted to the brutal killing of journalist Veronica Guerin, now it needs to find ways to combat the criminals who have swooped on boxing.
Organised crime figures and boxing have a history.
On February 5, 2016 a trusted lieutenant of the Kinahan crime family, David Byrne, was assassinated in the Regency Hotel in north Dublin during a boxing weigh-in. It was the third in a series of 14 murders, mostly associates of the Hutch crime family.
The failure of the Garda to anticipate the Regency shooting was much criticised at the time, but it has made valiant efforts to bring some of the perpetrators of this vicious series of murders to justice and prevent others from meeting a similar grisly end.
“Boxing to (Daniel) Kinahan has been described by those close to him is what football was to Pablo Escobar,” wrote sports journalist Ewan McKenna on the association between boxing and crime bosses.
“Sources say he’s long had an obsession with the sport – as did rival crime boss Gerry Hutch who was a major player in Irish boxing when Kinahan was only a kid.”
In January of this year, two young men were shot outside the National Stadium in Dublin while an Under-18 boxing tournament was in progress. Both were innocent victims: one a target, the other a student walking along a busy street near Griffith College.
Yesterday’s attack indicates there are ruthless crime factions on the periphery of boxing and there is a real or implied threat that the sport is not safe, either for participants or spectators.
BOXING, probably because of its physical nature and naked violence, has always attracted a criminal element; respectability is not a requirement, in or out of the ring.
When you strip away the technicalities it has the simple appeal for fans of two men, and now women, slugging it out in the ring with the last one standing declared the winner. Heroes and anti-heroes can be rolled into one.
Even for those of us who don’t particularly like pugilism Katie Taylor is a national hero, a cleanliving Christian who has carved-out a world-beating career with and without her father Pete.
We cannot allow her to feel unsafe in her own country. It is a stain on Ireland – and the sport – that criminals appear to have gate-crashed the boxing ring with blood-thirsty consequences.
In 1972 when Scotland and Wales refused to come to Dublin to play in the international rugby series at the height of the Troubles, some of us realised for the first time that outside observers regarded our country as a war zone.
One set of gunmen seem to have been replaced by another; the flash-point is boxing.