The Prisoner

Patrick Holland has a reputation as being Ireland’s top gangland hit man – albeit, as of now at least, a totally unsubstantiated one.
Dubbed “Dutchy” by the media, Holland has been accused of pulling the trigger in a number of the most high-profile murder cases that have occurred during the last two decades in this country. He was the prime suspect in the execution of the major underworld figure Paddy Shanahan, who was gunned down in 1994. It has also been alleged that Holland assassinated Ireland’s most notorious criminal kingpin, Martin Cahill, aka The General. He was also accused of being the hit man hired by Catherine Nevin, nicknamed The Black Widow, to execute her husband Tom.
However, it is the coldblooded murder of the crime reporter Veronica Guerin with which Holland is most closely associated in the public eye. It was widely speculated that the then 57-year-old was the pillion passenger on a stolen motorcycle, which pulled up beside Guerin’s red Opel Calibra at the traffic lights on the Naas Road. It was alleged by a Garda in court that Holland was the killer who jumped down off the bike and then, having used a handgun to smash the driver’s window of Guerin’s car, fired several close range shots at the Sunday Independent journalist, who died almost instantly.
Holland has always vigorously asserted his innocence of the slaying of Guerin.

It was a case of déjà vu. The lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano – dubbed ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ for representing numerous notorious clients, including Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic – had called me the previous month to enquire if Hot Press would like to interview his client John Gilligan. Once again, the colourful Italian lawyer phoned, with another intriguing proposition: did I want to meet another one of Ireland’s most infamous criminals, Paddy Eugene Holland?
Again, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse...
Two days later, I was sitting with Holland in London’s Wandsworth Prison. The 69-year-old pensioner is serving an eight-year sentence for apparently participating in an elaborate abduction – referred to as a ‘honey trap’ in the tabloids because a woman was used to lure the ‘mark’ into a sting. If successful, it was a ransom job that would have yielded the gang several million pounds.
However, Holland is adamant that he’s innocent and is convinced that he will be acquitted on his upcoming appeal.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he sighs, as we shake hands and sit down in the packed prison visitors’ centre. “Story of my life.”
Which, in a way, is what I’m here to explore.
“I don’t know if I should be telling you all this stuff,” he says, “because I’m planning to write an autobiography when I get out, which hopefully shouldn’t be too long. Giovanni assures me that I’ll win my appeal.”
But he does open up. For the next two hours, as we sip our cans of coke and munch on some Jaffa cakes bought in the tuck shop, Holland talks about the life of a strange, untypical, loner career criminal – as well as about some of the murders of which he has been accused. Almost inevitably, the picture he paints couldn’t be further removed from the portrayal of him in the tabloids. I’m not going to engage in journalistic theatrics here: I’ll tell it the way it happened, and report what he had to say.
Holland has been depicted as a heartless thug, and I’ve met some in my time. But the man in Wandsworth is a curiously contradictory, affable character. It’s true, as Shakespeare had it, that there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. It’s also true that there is no trace of a psychopath that I can detect in Patrick Holland.
We begin with the brutal murder of Veronica Guerin. It’s perfectly obvious that he will deny any involvement – but might there, in what he does say, be something that casts a different light on what we already know?
“Listen,” Holland declares. “I took a lie detector test to prove my innocence. Even Jimmy Guerin says he now believes that I didn’t carry out the murder. In fact, did you know that I was never even put in a line-up by the cops? Why? They even knew that I didn’t do it. I voluntarily came back to Dublin to be questioned. I wouldn’t have done that if I was guilty, would I?
“As far as I’m concerned, the cops immediately knew that they’d made a mistake by pointing the finger of blame at me. They realised this and that’s why I was never put in a line-up. An eyewitness at the scene saw the gunman through the visor of his helmet. He said that the gunman was a man in his 30s. I was a lot older than that at the time.”
Do you know who killed Veronica Guerin?
“No. I don’t know who carried it out. That’s the honest truth. But isn’t it amazing how only one person has been found guilty of participating in Veronica Guerin’s murder? And isn’t it amazing that there is nobody serving a prison sentence for actually pulling the trigger? Why haven’t the Gardai been able to identify and convict the killer? I don’t believe that they don’t know who carried out the hit. I have always thought there was something amiss about all this. There are serious questions here that remain unanswered. But after all these years, it looks like there will never be anybody convicted for the actual killing of Veronica Guerin.”
Have you ever killed anybody?
“Look, even if I had I wouldn’t admit to it. But the truthful answer is no. As I said, I took a lie detector test and it corroborated my innocence. I have been accused of shooting Martin Cahill and Paddy Shanahan. They even tried pinning the Black Widow case on me. I think they were even trying to suggest that Catherine Nevin and me were having an affair. But I never cheated on my wife. And, besides, I didn’t know the woman. I never spoke to her. I did see her once – the pub she had with her husband was near my home. I think I was fingered just because I was living in Wicklow.
“All these jobs would have been carried out by professional hit men – and I was never a professional hit man. But the lie detector test showed that I didn’t kill any of these people. It proved that I am not a hit man. I never killed anybody. That’s the God’s honest truth. Look, I have never ever been convicted of murdering anybody. However, I did accidentally shoot an accomplice in the arse once when my gun went off during a robbery. It was a pellet gun too, I might add.”
While Holland never stood trial for the murder of Veronica Guerin, he was found guilty – solely on the evidence of the State’s supergrass Charlie Bowden – of being a member of John Gilligan’s drugs gang. In 1997, at the age of 58, Holland received a 20 years sentence for allegedly dealing in cannabis. It was an extraordinarily harsh prison sentence for a mere hash dealer.
“I never dealt in drugs in my life. Yes, I knew John Gilligan but that doesn’t mean anything. I was stitched up. Basically, I was found guilty by association. A supergrass pointed his finger at me and that was the only evidence needed to find me guilty. I have never even tried any type of drug. Do you know that I don’t even drink or smoke? The only things I’m guilty of are armed robbery and forgery. Nothing else,” he insists.
On appeal, Holland’s sentence was reduced to 12 years and he was eventually freed in April 2006. Afterwards, The Mirror newspaper organised for Holland to take a polygraph examination to see if he was telling the truth. The test result declared that Holland had never killed anybody, nor had he ever bought or sold any illegal drugs. Summarising the data from the lie detector test, the eminent polygraph expert Jeremy Barrett stated at the time: “There is no doubt that he is, or has been, a villain and could be described as a career criminal. He certainly is ‘accepted’ by the criminal fraternity and, in some cases even respected. However, Patrick Eugene Holland is not a killer nor is he a drug trafficker or user.”

Unlike other notorious Irish criminals of his generation – including John Gilligan and Martin Cahill – Patrick Holland was not born into a life of poverty. He came from a respectable, middle-class family background. Born in March 1939, Holland spent his formative years in the often idyllic surroundings of Chapelizod, which back then was a rural community, relatively unspoiled by development.
Again, unlike his aforementioned gangland contemporaries, Holland did not participate in any criminal activities during his youth. Instead, he could be found scuba diving and playing football. He did have an interest in guns, practicing his marksmanship with an air rifle, in the local fields.
“I was scuba diving before anybody had even heard of it. I remember once coming out of the Liffey with this gigantic sword that I found at the bottom of the river,” he recalls. “If anything I was an outdoor type. I quickly became very good at hitting targets with my air rifle.”
Holland was very interested in Irish history. When he wasn’t devouring books on the subject, he would spend his evenings listening to his father recount stories of his experiences participating in the 1916 Easter Rising.
“My father knew many of those people connected with Michael Collins. Sometimes, these legendary Republican figures, who had fought alongside Michael Collins, would visit our house. I can remember being fascinated by the stories they’d tell,” Holland recalls.
Holland almost became a professional footballer, playing in the League of Ireland for a short period of time.
“I loved football and I was quite good at it. I played for St Pat’s. I even played with Johnny Giles,” he claims. “I bet you didn’t know that. We played together in a team called The Leprechauns. A few teams from England wanted me to come across. I went for trials with Arsenal, but soon afterwards I decided to go to America instead. I wanted to travel and see the world.”
In 1961, Paddy Holland emigrated to Chicago, Illinois. According to underworld folklore, it was here that Holland learnt his future trade as a ‘gun for hire’. It has been claimed that Holland joined the elite United States Marine Corps.
“Again, that’s not true. I wasn’t in the American army. I think a large part of this myth about me being one of the top hit men in Ireland is because it’s been reported in the media that I learnt how to become a killer in the American army. It’s just nonsense. I was involved for a while with the Republican movement and it was bandied about that I was a hit man for them. Again, utter nonsense.
“Now, I haven’t spoken about this publicly but I did work in the States for an offset printing company which handled work for the American army. That was how the idea that I was in the army took root.”
As a printer, Holland had gained the required experience to set himself up in the forgery trade. During the 1980s, he opened a small printing factory in Dublin city centre, on Gardiner Street.
“I was very good at the forgery game. There was big money in it,” he confesses. “But I don’t want to admit publicly to doing too much in this field. Forgery is a very serious criminal offence and, for example, you could even be extradited if you were foolish enough to admit to something like forging money.
“But it would be no secret that people would come to me for their driving license. That’s how I really got to know John Gilligan. He would come to me from time to time when he needed some documents. I met John sometimes on the continent and I could see that he was lonely over there on his own. He would be delighted to see me and just have a chat to relieve the boredom. I could see that he missed his family and wanted to be back at home with them.”
During his printing period, Holland showed an entrepreneurial streak, taking a crack at the publishing business. He tried his hand at a few different publications, but – at a time when RTÉ had a complete stranglehold on the information about what was happening on TV – it was his bootleg television guide which was his most successful.
“I had a great little operation going with the TV guides. It was a weekly guide and I would distribute it free for the first four weeks to housing estates all over Dublin. I would get somebody locally to go around the doors with it. It was 40 pence a copy and I would split that with whoever was selling it door-to-door. It was a great idea. It’s a shame it didn’t last.”
With his printing business losing money, Holland went back to doing what he was best at – robbing banks.
One high-level IRA source revealed to Hot Press that Holland was known in the underworld as a master counterfeiter. “He was,” the source said, “the best in the business. He did help the Republican movement out – like hundreds of others at that time. But, as far as we were concerned, Paddy Holland was a forger and a bank robber. But he was never a hit man and neither did we have him down for doing drugs either.”
According to Paul Williams’ highly engaging best-selling book Evil Empire, at one time Holland confessed to detectives that he had “worked” as a contract killer for the Mafia, both in Chicago and Boston, in the 1970s. Apparently, Williams writes, detectives were taken aback by this declaration but were unable to substantiate the claim with their FBI counterparts. When I put this story to him, Holland is adamant that there is no substance to it.
“I never worked as a hit man for the Mafia. I repeat: I have never killed anybody. I am not a murderer. There are so many untruths out there about me. It’s unbelievable. If the papers write something about you – even if it’s not true – it’s down as fact. People remember all the rubbish written about you. Also, you can be set up. Stuff can be planted in the back of your car, or somebody can point a finger at you in order to get a conviction. It happens all the time. I want to set the record straight about what I’ve done and what I haven’t done. That’s why I am determined to write my story when I get out of here,” he pronounces.
So how did Holland get the reputation for being a hit man?
“I robbed banks and I used guns when I was doing it. So, because I was associated with guns, people just presumed that I was trigger happy. But the truth is I tried my utmost never to fire a gun when I was doing a job. The lie detector test had asked if I’d killed anybody after 1980 – but if it had gone back further the only incident that would have come up would have been when, as I told you, I accidentally shot somebody in the arse.”
According to his account, rumours of Holland’s standing as a hit man grew like wildfire after an incident back in the 1980s. No one disputes that he was devoted to his wife Angela Swords. It might seem ironic given his own involvement in scaring the living daylights out of people while he robbed thousands of pounds from banks, but he took extreme umbrage when somebody broke into her car and stole the radio.
“He told me how she came home shaking after discovering her car had been broken into. That pissed Paddy right off,” recalls Holland’s lawyer, Di Stefano. Legend has it that a furious Holland marched around to all the usual suspects and shoved a loaded gun in their faces, threatening to blow away anybody who ever again upset his wife. Nobody even looked crooked at Holland after that incident.
His wife died on July 30, 2001. He was serving time in Portlaoise Prison when she passed away. Coincidentally, I met with Holland the day prior to the seventh anniversary of her death. When I ask him if he has any regrets in life, he pauses. His attitude contrasts starkly with John Gilligan’s. Of regrets, Dutchy Holland has more than a few…
Big boys don’t cry – but for a moment it looked as if Holland was about to.
“Yes, I have many, many regrets,” he admits. “I really regret not being there more for my wife. I wish I’d been there for her when I spent all those years in prison. I can sometimes get emotional just thinking about the amount of regrets I have in my life. It’s my wife’s anniversary tomorrow and I miss her dearly. She is always in my thoughts and prayers. Unfortunately, we never had children.”
It may go against the stereotype of a hardened criminal, but it seems that Paddy Holland is a deeply religious man. He is a regular churchgoer in Wandsworth Prison. In fact, when he was released from Portlaoise Prison in 2006 at one minute past midnight – at the behest of his lawyer Di Stefano who argued that his client should be released immediately, on the date his sentence ended – Holland went at 4am to visit his wife’s grave. “Later that day I got on a flight to Rome where I went to the Vatican,” he says. The following week Holland went on to the Catholic shrine in Lourdes.
But how does he square his religious beliefs with criminality? After all, he was putting innocent people’s lives at risk when he stormed into banks, waving a gun.
“I never hurt anybody when I was robbing the banks. OK, I did make the typical threat of, ‘Don’t move or I’ll shoot’, which is the classic bank robber’s line, but I never shot anybody. I didn’t fire off shots in the banks or anything like that. It is one thing to make threats in a stick-up, but it is an entirely different thing to actually do it. And I never did that. I have no convictions for assault or anything like it.
“I did have a conscience,” he pleads. “I remember staking out a place. It was a big job and I was going to make a small fortune from it, but I backed off at the very last minute because – just as the guy came out with the payroll – a nun came out of nowhere, all of a sudden." He laughs. "I was not going to do a job in front of a nun. I wouldn’t have been able to look myself in the mirror for doing something like that. Nobody was ever in any danger from me.”
But customers and staff caught up in a job were surely in fear? And the fact is that people’s lives were put at risk.
“Look, they were never in any danger, but I never thought about it like that – that they might have been in real fear. You have a point there. I’ll acknowledge that. Yes, I would deeply regret any suffering I caused to anybody. But I can’t take it back and you’ve got to understand that I was angry at the time. I was fuming with the authorities because I had been stitched up with my first conviction. I had been an honest man before that. So, every time I robbed a bank I was having a go at the system. It was my way of sticking my fingers up at them.
“I’m still angry over that very first conviction – it changed my life.”

Paddy Holland was 26-years-old when he received his first six months for receiving stolen goods. The year was 1965 and Holland was working as an assistant manager in the Donnelly’s sausage factory in the Coombe in the south inner city area of Dublin. Prior to the incident, it appears that he was regarded as a good worker and staff motivator by the company’s management.
“I was stitched up,” he repeats. “What happened was this: one day I was at work when a man I knew came by and asked me to look after some clothing for him. I think it was two theatrical fur coats. I told him that I’d look after the coats for him. No problem. I put them in my car for safekeeping. But then the police arrived and found the coats, which were stolen, in my car. I was arrested and charged with two counts of receiving stolen goods.”
He appealed the sentence, which was subsequently reduced to two months, but Holland lost his job. He was also ostracised by friends and relatives, disgusted at the thought of having a common thief in their midst.
“After that incident, I turned to crime. I always had a good knowledge of guns – so I decided to rob banks and post offices.”
It may have put him beyond the pale for most people, but as an armed bank raider, Holland had a different kind of chutzpah. He was a master of disguises. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to wear several layers of clothing; he even dressed up as a painter on one occasion to blend in when he discovered a particular target was being redecorated. Despite his broken nose, Holland would also turn up to rob banks dressed as a woman. Regardless of whatever disguise he was adopting, Holland always wore a hairpiece over his bald head and was thus known at one stage as ‘The Wig’.
“I knew this guy who was making wigs. He had his premises down near Christchurch. He was making wigs that were absolutely perfect. I mean, when you examined them closely you couldn’t tell that they were wigs. They looked so real. I think he was making them for cancer patients. Anyway, I was originally planning to take his wigs and sell them in America. I felt we could make a fortune with them over there,” Holland recalls. “That’s how I got the idea to use wigs for the robberies. The first time I got arrested for armed robbery, they caught me with the wig still on. I spent four months in Portlaoise prison with that wig on. Nobody knew I was bald! They only discovered it was a wig when I took it off in court one day to scratch my head. The judge went mad over it. He did his nut.”
In the mid-’70s, Holland carried out a series of major robberies. With his novel approach of acting on his tod, he quickly became known to the Gardai and the media as the mysterious “lone raider”.
“I liked to rob banks on my own. There were less risks. It was easier, because you didn’t have to keep an eye out for anybody else – and, besides, you also didn’t have to share the spoils. I would go in, rob the bank without firing a single shot, and just walk out the door with a bag of cash. It was that simple. If, for example, I was planning to rob a bank on College Green, I’d have a taxi waiting at the start of Grafton Street. I would nearly always use taxis for my getaway from bank jobs,” he says.
On one occasion, Holland walked into a bank and had somebody phone through to one of the cash desks, looking for a fictitious name. He then played a waiting game, chatting on the phone until all the customers had vacated the building. When the coast was clear, Holland produced a gun and hit the stunned clerk with the classic bank robber punch line: “Fill it up.”
Careful planning meant that he was never chased from the scene of a bank robbery. However, he does recall one occasion when the security guards unwittingly aided his heist.
“I was staking out this building, waiting for a large payroll to arrive. But I timed it all wrong. I saw the security guards getting into the elevator with the money and had to dash for the elevator. The guards saw me and held the door open for me. When I got into the lift with them, one of the guards asked, ‘What floor do you want to get off at?’ I was even forgetting to press a button to get out,” Holland pauses and asks rhetorically, “What floor would you get off, if you were about to carry out a robbery?”
The next possible floor, I suggest.
“Exactly! That’s exactly what I did. So, I said, ‘The next floor please’, and as soon as he pressed the button, I pulled out my gun and told them to hand over the bag of money. I then dashed down the stairs and out of the building. As luck would have it, there was somebody outside who offered me a lift down the road. I then jumped out of the car and got a taxi home. That’s a true story.”
Holland was eventually captured for armed robbery in 1975. He opted to abscond. His wife went with him and they settled down in America. But the security in banks over there was too good for him to contemplate armed robbery. Apart from the fear of getting shot, Holland knew that jail sentences in America for armed robbery were much tougher. Instead, he came up with the novel idea of brief ‘working holidays’ back home.
“I would make flying visits in order to rob some banks. After I’d get a bit of money together I’d fly back to the States. I was able to get high-tech radio receivers in America that would allow me to tune into the Gardai headquarters. So, I was able to hear straight away if they’d been notified about the robbery. I was able to stay one step ahead of the law that way,” he reveals.
In 1981, Holland was picked up by Gardai as he attempted to board a ferry in Rosslare. They’d been tipped off that Dutchy, who was using a fake passport, was planning to head back to America via France with the loot from some recent high-profile robberies. He was sentenced to seven years for armed robbery. This was Holland’s first long stretch behind bars. “I was released after serving five years and I vowed that I wouldn’t get captured again,” he says.
No such luck. When he was released from Portlaoise in 1986, Holland opted to team up with an armed gang. It’s believed that this gang included the notorious General, Martin Cahill, and his brother Joe Cahill.
“I did join up with a gang to rob banks. But I don’t really want to reveal who or who wasn’t in the gang I worked with, as I wasn’t caught doing any jobs with this particular crew,” is all he’ll say about it today.
“But even when I did bank jobs with others, I would always wait until the gang had left to ensure that nobody raised the alarm. So, in some ways, it was still like I was robbing the banks on my own because I was continuing to take the major risk of staying behind. But it was a job I was good at. And, to tell you the truth, I got an unbelievable adrenaline rush from robbing banks. I didn’t drink or smoke, so I suppose I had to get my kicks from something. For the first few jobs I was nervous as hell. The sweat would be pumping off me from the fear of getting caught. But after a while – after I had done a few jobs – the fear went away. I can’t remember how many jobs I did. I have genuinely lost count. And I can’t even remember which jobs I was even done for. That’s the God’s honest truth,” he states.
What do you make of today’s younger generation of criminals?
“I would have to honestly say that the style of criminality today is alien to me,” he avers. “It’s a completely different world from the type of stuff we would do in our day. There’s more of a viciousness about these younger guys. From what I read in the papers, life seems to be cheap. In my day, you’d get a hiding as a punishment, but nowadays they’ll blow you away and ask questions later. Also, in my day, there was a code of honour in the criminal world – you could give your word and shake hands on deals, knowing that it was very unlikely that you’d be double-crossed. I was always a man of my word. It’s different now…
“There’s a lot more drugs involved. Some of these new guys are taking drugs and getting paranoid. You can’t be doing business in that type of condition. You need your full wits about you. Also, a lot of crime today is coming from young guys just being bored. Back in my day, there was high unemployment and people were either doing bank jobs to earn money for their families or for the Republican cause. Today, people are robbing to feed their drug addiction.” .

Holland got a run of three years before he was captured again, in 1989. The previous year the anti-terrorist Special Detective Unit had discovered he had links with the IRA.
“I was never a member of the IRA or the INLA, as has been inaccurately reported. I would have helped out the Republican movement from time to time, but I was not politically motivated,” says Holland. In other words, as one senior ranking IRA source told Hot Press, Holland was a “freelance operator”. But these paramilitary connections brought unwanted attention.
He was being secretly monitored by the Special Branch who raided his house when he was negotiating a trade of weapons for explosives with a senior IRA official. Legend has it that when the armed police kicked the front door down, all those inside the house – apart from Holland himself – made a run for it. He simply put his hands up and coolly declared that he was taking “full responsibility” for anything illegal found on the premises.
Recalling the episode today, Holland says: “Yes, I was done for explosives. But all the stuff found in the house was for the bank jobs I was carrying out. I would use explosives to help crack open safes.”
For this, Holland was given ten years in Portlaoise Prison in 1990, but his sentence was reduced and he was free in September 1994. Again, his freedom was relatively short-term. He was re-arrested in 1996.
It was during the early 1990s in Portlaoise Prison that Holland first met John Gilligan, who was serving four years for being in possession of stolen goods.
“I liked John Gilligan as a person, but any time we were in prison together you'd never find me walking around the yard with his gang or any other gang. I kept to myself. I suppose you could describe me as a bit of a loner. When I was on the outside, I wasn’t anti-social – but I was never one for going to pubs because I didn’t drink.”
I heard you were planning to buy a public house once?
“Yeah, it was true that I planned to buy a pub. In fact, the accountant I was using at the time was based on the same street as your magazine, Hot Press. He was arranging for a loan of £1.2 million for me. I wasn’t going to have to put any money up front. It would have been an excellent business opportunity – one that would have seen me go straight – but, sadly, it didn’t work out. Also, do you know that it was reported in the papers that I used to go to nightclubs? Now, that’s absolute rubbish. I wouldn’t be interested in going to clubs. I was a devoted husband. I liked spending time at home with my wife. Angela was the only woman in my life. We had a lovely cottage in County Wicklow. That was paradise to me – those moments with Angela in our dream home.”
People may not be much impressed by the sentimentality of the image, but no matter: Holland didn’t get to spend much time in his dream home, before it was confiscated as the proceeds of crime by the Criminal Assists Bureau (CAB). In total, Holland has received sentences totalling 55 years and, so far, spent approximately 25 years in prison – which amounts to more than a third of his life. He is what’s best described as an institutionalised criminal. Underworld sources often comment that Holland is more at home being incarcerated than being free. They say he won’t know what to do with himself when he’s finally released which, as a worst case scenario for him, could be at the end of his current eight year sentence. He would be 76 then.
“I’ll be out a lot sooner than that,” Holland says optimistically. “You won’t do more than four years of an eight year sentence. But getting back to my plans, I’ll go and live in Rome. Giovanni is not just my lawyer, he is a good friend at this stage. I first came in contact with Giovanni after I saw a documentary about him on the BBC while I was in Portlaoise. I decided to write to him and he came and visited me. At the time, I was considering legal action against the makers of the Veronica Guerin movie. The portrayal of me in that film is slanderous. We’re still considering taking action over it. So, that’s what I’ll do when I’m a free man – I’ll go over and stay with Giovanni while I get settled into a new life in Italy. In fact, Giovanni is going to run in Dublin in next year’s European Elections and – if I’m a free man – I’m planning to come back to Ireland to show my support for him by canvassing for him. I’ll go out on the streets of Dublin and knock on doors to ask people to give Giovanni their number one vote.”

Holland might have been a hardened career criminal, but he wasn’t known to the public, prior to the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996. He’d only been out of prison two years when he was fingered by the supergrass Charlie Bowden as allegedly being part of Gilligan’s cannabis operation. Holland voluntarily came back to be questioned, but during the interrogation at the Garda station, recording transmitters were discovered in Holland’s shoes.
“I wanted to record everything that was said to me during the questioning. I was afraid I was going to be stitched up,” he explains. “I wanted them to record the interview because I was afraid that they might make up quotes and attribute them to me. They never recorded the interview and, to this day, I still wonder about this. My solicitor, James Orange, was taken in for questioning about the sale of my home – at the very same time I was being questioned. He was released almost at the very same time as I was. I do not believe that this is coincidental. I think it was done to stop me having access to legal advice.”
Gardai had uncovered a drugs warehouse, which they believed was being operated by John Gilligan, at Greenmount Industrial Estate in South Dublin. At the scene, they found 37 kilos of cannabis and, more vitally, bookkeeping evidence of the cannabis operation. In it, there were detailed accounts of a dealer named ‘The Wig’, who had been dealing in cannabis for exactly one year. Supergrass Charlie Bowden, who has since been acknowledged as an unreliable witness, claimed that Holland was the dealer using this pseudonym. Bowden’s testimony was enough to get Holland a staggering 20 years for dealing hash.
Speaking last month to Hot Press, John Gilligan said: “There was a list found and Charlie gave the names of all the people on that list and 14 people got arrested. And the 14 were held for two days and they all said, ‘No, I never done drugs. I never got drugs off Charlie Bowden’. And they never charged anybody on the list in Greenmount. Why weren’t they charged? It was the same with Paddy Holland. Charlie turned around and said, ‘I used to give Paddy Holland drugs’. And he said it about 14 other people and they didn’t get charged, but Paddy did; in the Special Criminal Court they said, ‘Yeah, we believe you (Holland) got drugs off him’.”
Then in court, a female Garda declared her belief that Patrick Holland was the killer of Veronica Guerin. He was never charged with the crime, but the declaration spread like wildfire and, fuelled by media speculation, Holland – like John Gilligan – was found guilty in the court of public opinion. Even Jimmy Guerin, who originally suspected Holland had murdered his sister in cold blood, is of the opinion that Bowden’s motive as supergrass was to deflect attention away from himself as the culprit. Writing in the book Justice Denied, Guerin stated: “The more evidence that was introduced, trial after trial, along with Bowden’s demeanour and his inconsistencies, resulted in my believing that it was Bowden who had carried out the actual shooting.”
When Holland was released in April 2006 he wanted to clear his name by appearing on the Late Late Show. But, at the last minute, the plug was pulled on his appearance by RTÉ management. “I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t permitted to go on the show. Everybody is entitled to tell their side of the story. Unfortunately, I wasn’t permitted. I was effectively censored,” Holland complains.
However, his lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano arranged several high profile media appearances, such as a Sky News interview, and a lie detector test to prove his innocence.
“I remember that first night I was released. I was set free one minute after midnight and I was taken away to the hotel. I couldn’t eat or sleep that night. I paced around my hotel room, as it sunk in that I was a free man, and then went to my wife's grave,” Holland recalls.
His freedom didn’t last long. On May 1, 2007 – a mere 13 months later – Paddy Holland was detained in London for abduction and firearms offences.
“I had planned to fly to Rome that day but was unable to find an available seat on any plane,” he says. Holland was accused of masterminding the botched kidnapping of a businessman named Nasir Zahid, with a £10 million ransom as the prize. A 24-year-old woman, Khan Coombs, was to be used as a ‘honey trap’ to entice the business man to a pre-designated location. However, the UK police were tipped off and they recorded conversations. On one of the recordings, John McDonnell, an acquaintance of Holland, is heard saying to Coombs: “I think it’s a great idea to get you in there to lure out the bastard. When you bring him out we can take him to the slaughterhouse.”
In March of this year Holland was sentenced to eight years for the kidnapping case. He is maintaining his innocence. “I was not involved in this crime. I am not a kidnapper or a murderer or a drug dealer. I spent my life in crime robbing banks and doing forgery work. I was stitched up,” he maintains.
Why would anyone bother to stitch him up?
“I believe that the Irish government conspired with Scotland Yard to have me put away regardless. They wanted to shut me up. At the time of my arrest for this kidnapping charge, I was taking a case against the Irish government for my wrongful drugs conviction. It would be a total embarrassment to the Irish government if the convictions based on evidence from those supergrasses didn’t hold up, wouldn’t it?” he argues.
His lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano also believes it was no coincidence that Holland’s arrest coincided with plans to pursue a Section 2 Miscarriage of Justice Act.
“This conviction has seriously hampered his case against the Irish State in relation to his seeking justice for his wrongful conviction for allegedly dealing cannabis. If Holland’s conviction was overturned, it would have meant that Charlie Bowden’s evidence was nothing but lies – blatant lies. Now, that would mean that all convictions based on evidence from Mr Bowden should be overturned. The fact is that Holland’s arrest in the UK ensured that nobody walked free.You won't convince me that Scotland Yard weren't told to get Paddy Holland at all costs. When he gets out, we will get back to focusing on his miscarriage of justice case in Ireland,” says Di Stefano.
Di Stefano believes Holland will be a free man in October when the Criminal Appeals Court takes into account new evidence that was not revealed during his original trial. He says: “This is only the second time in my entire career that the Registrar for the Criminal Appeals Court has actually referred a case himself to the Full Court without going through a Single Judge of The High Court. These moments are rare indeed and the only other case was that of John Goldfinger Palmer and I ultimately won that and Palmer got off a £47m confiscation.
“Basically,” Di Stefano explains, “during Paddy’s trial, the so-called ‘victim’ was facing a trial in Southwark Crown Court on a £200 million VAT fraud case. This was not disclosed to the defence or to the jury. This would have had a major impact on the trial.”
Technically, if his conviction is quashed, Holland could sue for damages. “He could get in the region of a half million euro,” reckons Di Stefano. So, who ever said that crime doesn’t pay? Well…
“I wish I’d never got involved in any shape or form of criminal activity,” says Holland. “It’s ruined my life. Every time I was locked up in prison, it devastated my wife. If I could turn back the clock, I would change many, many things. For me, crime didn’t pay. I will go to my grave with so many regrets.”
After two hours chatting to Holland, an announcement is made that visiting time is over. He gets up, shakes my hand and heads back to his cell.
As I was leaving the prison, it dawned on me that Holland was the first criminal I'd spoken to who didn’t use bad language during the course of our conversation. “God bless,” he had said, as he bid me a safe journey back to Dublin. A few days after our chat, Holland wrote to thank me for coming to visit him. He ended the letter by saying: “The next time you come to England drop in to see me. Goodbye for now. God bless, Paddy.”
If nothing else, Patrick Eugene Holland is a very courteous criminal.