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

“Jason, how are you keeping?” he asked. “It’s great to see you. Sorry, I can’t offer you a cup of tea. But everything has changed in here these days. Tighter security. Sit down there.”

Gilligan pulled two chairs up and we sat down facing each other. A prison officer walked in behind him and sat down in the far corner of the room. Gilligan was dressed smartly in a pair of Louis Copeland trousers and a designer shirt. He also looked fit and considerably younger than his age of 56, the shock of grey hair the only indication of aging. “I’m not into clothes. The trousers are from my court case,” he told me. “My daughter got them a few years ago and the shirt was given to me by one of the lads on my landing. But I do like to work-out in the gym.”

After a bit of small talk, we got down to business. Visitors are allowed a maximum of two hours and I had dozens of questions. As if he was reading my mind, Gilligan said, “We’ll have to talk fast.”

Nothing else for it then…

Here I was sitting eyeball to eyeball with a man widely perceived as the most reviled criminal in Ireland. He might have been acquitted of the murder of the Sunday Independent crime reporter Veronica Guerin, but the tabloids are still making John Gilligan out to be guilty-as-sin. It’s a depiction he is determined to change. In court, under privilege, he has already named another criminal, John Traynor, as the man who masterminded the murder.

I don’t know John Gilligan. Nor do I know what he has done, as a criminal or as a citizen. But as Anne Harris of the Sunday Independent famously said in a different context, everyone is entitled to tell their own story. It is up to the reader then to decide what has or hasn’t the ring of truth.

This much we do know: found guilty of smuggling cannabis on the evidence of a number of ‘supergrasses’, who had been given immunity by the State, Gilligan was handed what most people would consider a ridiculously lengthy prison sentence of 28 years for that crime. The perception is that it was a murder sentence by default. On appeal, the term was reduced to 20 years, but even that is wildly extravagant for a hash dealer. Giovanni Di Stefano is adamant that such a crime should only warrant a six-year sentence at the very most. “And that would be on a bad day,” he insisted.

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