The true story of the John Gilligan gang

When Sunday Independent journalist Veronica Guerin was gunned down in cold blood on the Naas Road, the finger of suspicion turned on John Gilligan.

Jason O'Toole, 28 Jul 2008

“I kept my head down,” he says. “I didn’t even drive when I got out of prison the last time. When you drive and the police stop you it comes over the police radios – then you come back into every policeman’s mind again. It would be a case of ‘Oh, is he out?’ because when you go away they forget about you.

“I wouldn’t even get a car now, because when I was in prison the last time, I noticed my problem was that I was well known. When I’d get stopped in a car, it’d come over a police radio, ‘John Gilligan going up Kylemore Road, engaged in crime!’ I’d hear it on my scanner in my car because I was tuned into the police. I’d hear it all the time. So, I said, ‘When I get out, the one thing I won’t be having is a car’. Out of sight, out of mind.”

John Gilligan says that he tried to go straight on several occasions. He opened as a second-hand car dealer in town. It was a profitable little business – but it didn’t take long before any money he was taking in was going out just as quickly on the horses. Eventually, a bookies opened near his garage and Gilligan could be found there most days of the week.

“I gave the garage over to my brother. But what annoyed me was this: when I was straight that time, the police would stop me and give me a hard time. They’d find tools of the car trade in the backseat and be going, ‘John, you going to rob a factory?’ They wouldn’t believe that I was doing me utmost and I believed I was going to be successful. They just harassed me. In fact, I tried going straight three or four times.”

Nobody, he insists, called him ‘Factory John’ during the height of his infamy. “I wasn’t called that by my mates,” he states. “That’s the truth of God. How that came about now, right... when all this came out, that’s when they when they started saying, ‘He grew up and used to be known as Factory John’. I don’t think that came out until about 1997. I don’t believe you’ll find an article in any newspaper before 1996. I hadn’t any nickname. I was just John. I had no reputation like Martin Cahill, the way they are saying I am now. It was only from the time I got locked up that the papers gave me a reputation. I was known for being straight, honest and fair. If you had a row with me and we shook hands, that was the end of it. The nicknames only came out as a result of the newspapers, when they started saying ‘The Penguin’ etc, in order not to identify the person and risk being sued.”

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