These barbaric killers will be caught. But it shouldn’t come to this

IT should not have come to this. It should not have come to the point where a 17-yearold boy was subjected to a medieval execution method before the State took action. It should not have taken the dismemberment of a child’s skinny body, and the public exhibition of his remains as a warning to others, in a manner last witnessed nearly 300 years ago, for a modern nation to cry halt.

It is centuries since the unspeakably savage practice of quartering and publicly displaying the bodies of executed prisoners was abandoned in this part of the world. Yet it has taken the revival of this deranged and diabolical ritual by a Drogheda criminal gang, with social media now serving as the public square, for horrified citizens to demand a swift political and policing response.

There have been cases where murdered people were dismembered and body parts scattered here in the past. But, say gardaí, these gruesome acts were an attempt to conceal a crime or prevent identification. They were not a function of sadism, warped egos and gangland gamesmanship, not a deliberate attempt to unnerve rivals and showcase ruthlessness – unlike the fate meted out to Keane Mulready-Woods. His killers had no intention of concealing what they’d done to the boy or hiding his identity, quite the opposite.

They were boasting of how they’d killed him, they were revelling in his unimaginable suffering, and they were using his poor, butchered corpse as a warning to their enemies. This marks a whole new departure for crime in this country.

Shocked

And since this is not the first time that criminal depravity has brought the country to a shocked standstill, we can probably predict what will happen next.

We saw what happened when Veronica Guerin was shot dead in broad daylight by Dublin gangsters, when Shane Geoghegan was murdered in a case of mistaken identity by Limerick thugs, when Kevin Lunney’s abduction and torture saw the long-running campaign of intimidation of Quinn Industrial Holdings personnel go just that bit too far.

Suddenly, all the resources required to go after the culprits were readily to hand. The Criminal Assets Bureau, one of the most inspired and effective policing tools available to any force in the world, was set up after Veronica Guerin’s murder.

By the ingeniously simple device of identifying those people whose lifestyles were not commensurate with their legitimate income – like unemployed men with Ferraris in the driveways of their local authority homes – CAB employed a range of powers and expertise, from revenue to social welfare, to ensnare the gangsters whose wealth had made them believe themselves untouchable.

And in none of those previous instances were the gardaí dealing with brilliant criminal masterminds. The names of Veronica Guerin’s killers were practically household currency by the time they were rounded up. The Limerick ‘feuds’, or territorial battles between rival criminal gangs, were named for the leading families at war. As regards the QIH campaign of terror, a priest told his local congregation that even the dogs in the street knew who was behind it.

And anyone with access to a WhatsApp chat group last week can probably name the chief suspects in Keane Mulready-Woods torture and murder.

I’ve never seen such a volume of distressing material being shared so readily on social media on pretty much any topic – let alone a violent murder.

Even to an amateur eye, the amount of evidence in those posts was astonishing: locations, weapons, comments, nicknames and significant clues were brazenly paraded.

A flip-flop, in one image, was a reference to a gym-bag stolen from a gangster in a confrontation captured in another video in wide circulation; his ego had been bruised, it seems, when rivals – possibly including the murdered boy – taunted him over the flip-flops they found in his bag.

Evidence

Garda sources say the crime scene, which they located very quickly, was badly cleaned up and has yielded a trove of forensic evidence, as have the hastilydumped weapons believed to have been used in the murder.

On past form, then, it is likely that the perpetrators of this crime will be caught, their criminal operations closed down, and public fears calmed until the news cycle moves on.

Yet if Keane Mulready-Woods had been killed by a swift bullet to the head, like so many young and forgotten victims of these feuds, the current gangs could have carried on untroubled by the law or public sentiment.

So the next generation of drug gangsters, who take over the reins, will learn from their mistakes and will keep their murderous activities clean and low-key. Until they, too, overplay their impunity and the next outrage provokes another bout of political hand-wringing and police action. But it really should not come to that.