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How Irish police tackled Dublin’s drug gangs after fake SWAT team besieged hotel during bitter feud | World News
A decade on from Ireland’s most notorious gangland hit, Irish police say they have had “unprecedented” success in tackling Dublin’s drug gangs – and ending a bitter feud that claimed at least 18 lives.
In 2025, the Gardai recorded a total of zero gangland gun murders “for the first time in modern times” – believed to be at least 30 years.
Ninety-eight members of the two most infamous organised crime groups – the Hutch and Kinahan gangs – have been jailed, and 51 attempted hits have been foiled.
It was the Hollywood-style attack on the Regency Hotel that changed Ireland’s crime landscape forever.
On 5 February 2016, a hit squad of assassins disguised as a police SWAT team besieged a boxing weigh-in at the hotel, near Dublin Airport.
AK47-style assault rifles were fired as hundreds of panicked attendees fled. Several were injured in the chaos, and one man – Kinahan associate David Byrne – was killed in the lobby.
The attack, Gardai say, was carried out by the Hutch gang – their target was Daniel Kinahan, head of their bitter rivals.
It accelerated a feud that shocked Ireland with its ferocity, and ultimately backfired on both gangs as the police backlash strengthened.
The Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, only a year old, led the way.
Dubliners became accustomed to heavily-armed police checkpoints in the inner city, as politicians promised all the resources necessary.
The Regency Hotel shooting “was not just an attack on a sporting event, and the murder of Mr Byrne, but an attack on our state and and an affront to all right-minded and peaceful citizens”, according to Garda Assistant Commissioner Angela Willis.
The gardai responded “with a sustained and relentless campaign to disrupt, degrade and dismantle the Hutch and Kinahan criminal organisations and their criminal activity”, she said.
At a press conference in Dublin today, Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland vowed that the force would not become “complacent” in combatting organised crime.
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“We don’t live in Nirvana”, he said, warning the continued demand for illegal drugs could fuel potential upsurge in gang violence.
Now, he says, the Kinahan cartel “no longer exists as it did in 2016”, although the Hutch group remains active and a target of investigation.
Its alleged leader, Gerry “The Monk” Hutch, was acquitted of Mr Byrne’s murder in a well-publicised trial in April 2023.
Against a backdrop of policing success, Boland says he does not regard that the absence of a murder conviction a decade on as a policing failure, or a regret.
“We’re not emotional about these things”, he says.
“There are no regrets.”