Let’s put stop to whale tragedy

The senior Kinahan thug has led a near 20-year campaign of terror on the streets of the capital – leaving the bodies of opponents and innocents in his wake.

This was not just the superb efforts of Kevin Street and Kilmainham Garda stations – this was a fight back by the people who live in their communities.

David Douglas was a criminal and had been involved in gangland but his murder will now go down as a landmark moment in the State’s war on the Kinahan gang.

Tragically his daughter witnessed the atrocity – her dad blasted six times in the head.

Witnesses then saw the gunman turning from the scene and smirking. Nearby Thompson destroyed a mobile phone and sneered as the tragic events unfolded.

But now it is not him who is smiling – it is the brave members of An Garda Siochana who led a faultless investigation against the thug.

The gardai who recovered the cars, the cops who preserved the evidence and those who launched raid after raid in the aftermath are all part of this victory.

Let this conviction be a warning to those who seek to destroy this inner city community with drugs and murder. THE death of 17 whales off Ireland’s coast – and a similar number off Scotland – was no coincidence.

That’s the conclusion of experts, who say military exercises in the Atlantic are the most likely cause of the sonar blasts which have driven these creatures to their deaths.

It comes with a caution: many of the bodies are badly decomposed and only intensive and specialised postmortems will determine the exact cause.

In Britain, the deaths are rightly being investigated by authorities – the Department of the Marine must adopt a similar approach here.