Grieving mothers’ cries don’t trouble the thugs
AFTER his trial fell apart so dramatically, the word on Patrick Hutch is that he’s slipped away to a secret hideaway in Northern Ireland, from where he’ll eventually escape abroad. His exile will come as a relief to his long-suffering mother Kay, who already has lost one son to this savage feud.
Patrick, who was accused of the murder of Kinahan henchman David Byrne, may be a dead man walking for the rest of his life but he has a far better chance of celebrating his 27th birthday on the run than at his home on Champions Avenue in inner city Dublin.
Kay Hutch lost her elder son Gary near Marbella in 2015. His murder ignited the spate of killings that has brought terror to the streets of Dublin and claimed 18 lives so far, two of them innocent men.
Gary, 34, was gunned down in cold blood as he came home from his jog. Like most of the men caught up in this brutal cycle of violence, he was no angel (he was a member of a drug syndicate in Spain and had convictions for robbery) but his heartbroken mother, rightly suspecting that his murder would catalyse a cycle of tit-for-tat revenge killings, pleaded for an end to the violence.
‘We do not want retaliation,’ she told the mourners at Gary’s funeral in Seán McDermott Street church. ‘We don’t wish pain on any other family… I let God be our judge.’
But Kay’s heartfelt words, like those of the mothers of so many paramilitary figures or underworld mobsters before her echo throughout history, from ancient Greece to the 1916 Rising, immortalised in plays from Seán O’Casey’s The Plough And The Stars to the classical tragedies, fell on deaf ears.
THE thugs who mourned her son had their revenge in the Regency Hotel, where a Sopranostyle armed attack saw David Byrne mistakenly killed, and Kay’s other son, Patrick, accused of the hit. That bloodbath culminated in the collapsed murder trial where an anguished Sadie Byrne, mother of Derek, spoke with an almost Shakespearian rage of her suffering.
Like Gary Hutch, David Byrne was no angel. He was a known drug dealer but his brutal death was undeserved. And like Kay Hutch, Sadie Byrne, the matriarch on the other side of the blood-soaked Hutch/ Kinahan feud, pleaded for peace and an end to the feud. In all likelihood, her words too will be ignored.
She said outside the court: ‘Of course we want it to end. Who wants a feud? Who wants to live like this? Who wants their child riddled? Gone to a sporting event and he doesn’t come home.’ When it was put to her that Patrick Hutch’s life was in danger now, she replied: ‘His life is not in danger from us’.
The reprisals for the Regency came quickly in 2016 with the murder of Eddie Hutch Sr, uncle of the late Gary and Patrick and brother of the infamous Gerry Hutch, known as The Monk. Derek and Gareth Hutch, both nephews of the Monk, were also gunned down. Gareth’s mother, Vera, also passionately encapsulating her pain at the death of her ‘child’, how the pain was unbearable and the family would never get over it. Matriarchs are never as powerful as they are when begging for an end to bloodshed. Their tragedy is their lack of influence. The agonised cries of Sadie Byrne or Kay Hutch may resonate throughout history as they humanise their sons while pleading with them and their enemies to turn from the path of violence. Sadly, their sons’ callous indifference to these raw displays of maternal love and heartbreak is as much a mirror of their vicious thuggery as their mindless murder sprees.