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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Over the course of very quickly of the afternoon, it changed from a political demonstration into raw tuggery and violence on the street where people were being singled out and attacked, including journalists. And Gardaí, obviously, Charlie Bird, most famously, was attacked on the street, singled out for being, as he said, they called him an orange bastard.
And he was saved by members of the crowd and Gardaí and brought to hospital. I'm Nicola Tallent and this is Crime World, a podcast about criminals, drugs and the sins of the underworld. If you like this podcast and want to learn more about crime, go to our new website www.crimeworld.com for stories, extras and podcast subscriber specials.
It was the loyalist rally that sparked chaos on the streets of Dublin after Gardaí failed to predict the riot. 20 years ago last week, Dublin city centre was smashed up as rioters attacked Gardaí with petrol bombs and bricks ahead of a Love Ulster parade. Today I'm talking to Crime World's Neil Feddersen-Haw about our memory of the day the city was set alight.
I'm Niall Donald and this is Crime World, a podcast from crimeworld.com. So Neil, we decided to go back to the Love Ulster riots, basically for one reason, because you were looking at the Wikipedia page and then you pointed out, that's you, isn't it? And so since everything is all about me, Neil, and I'm always the centre of everything. Yes, I am on the Wikipedia page and I looked it up.
And there you can see my head quite a lot browner at the time. Yeah. As people start to hoist barricades into the air. Yeah. It was 20 years ago last week. And we were both there at the time. Yeah. And it was actually unforgettable, I have to say. It was absolute and utter chaos. Yeah. Tell us, you were sent down. It was for the Sunday World at the time, was it? Yeah, it was.
I think we were both there for different people. Yeah, I was there. I was working for the Sunday Mirror at the time. Yeah. Significantly more, less grey. It was a different look. It was a different look. But you stood out in the picture. I did. Front and centre. I did. But, you know, it wasn't predicted what was going to happen.
I mean, I remember being sent down there and thinking it was going to be possibly some sort of relatively boring, obscure, kind of Nordy row. Now, there had been publicity on it during the week. But nobody expected it to kick off like it did. No, and in fact, you're right. There could have been some controversy on the airwaves beforehand, but I was oblivious to that.
I came into the Sunday World newsroom about midday to start my shift and there was no sort of urgency or plan of action or, you know, we've got to get down there and we've got to cover this. It was more a case of have a wander down and take a look and kind of keep our eye on proceedings in case something anything happened. So it was a real case of just in case. And so I wandered down.
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Chapter 2: What sparked the Love Ulster riots in Dublin 20 years ago?
They started to amass. But I remember it kicked off, it was a sort of rowdy, buzzy atmosphere. And then within a couple of minutes, people started pushing against the barriers. They started getting... and it was out of control really, really quickly. And I mean, the guards just totally backed off. Yeah, that's my memory of it.
It was kind of smoldering, to use a fire analogy, and then suddenly, vroom, it went up. It seemed to happen, I can't identify the exact reason or moment that it happened, but it was literally in seconds, wasn't it? And then, those Gardaí that you refer to, these weren't riot police, they were just like flat-capped cops.
I saw one of them go down, you know, being hit in the head, and then I realised, you know, I remember ringing back to newsroom going, this is actually kicking off. I think we need to get more people down here. And at that state, it seemed to very quickly get out of control. Yeah. And meanwhile, you had all these bands and marchers in the background, presumably being shepherded
shepherded back onto the buses to get them out of there now there were some guards around them if I remember correctly probably there was more but I was down the other side where the sort of the mass of the crowd were and there was almost none now the background of it of course is people you know don't really remember it but a lot of it was around a guy called Willie Fraser who
Billy Fraser's now passed away. He was, I suppose, he was a troll before trolling existed, if you know what I mean. I don't know if Bebo was around, but he was kind of like a real life troll. Now other people maybe have a better perspective on him, but So he ran this organization, was it Families Against Intimidation and basically targeting Republicans.
And it was more or less a propaganda campaign. And his perspective was that Sinn Féin, IRA as he would call them, were getting an easy time in the media and the families were being sort of the victims of the crimes are being forgotten. And he, in particular, sort of focused on the Irish government.
Now, it was 2006, you know, most people in Dublin, I think, didn't really have a lot of interest in this as such. But what his perspective was that, you know, basically trying to equate the Irish government with the IRA and he, you know, he wanted to sort of go down and make a point in Dublin. Yeah. And there had been a build up.
I think it was on Joe Duffy during the week that they were coming down. And obviously the main issue was that they, or what I remember the main issue being was that they were going to bring Union Jacks. They were going to wave Union Jacks as they walked through. And the plan was to walk from the Garden of Remembrance up O'Connell Street around Trinity and up to the back of Leinster House.
and make a protest there. And so there was a build-up, but it looked like, you know, and if I remember correctly, there was a focus on the Union Jack, but as I said, but a lot of it was really seemed to kind of slightly obscure kind of debate. Yeah. The best you could say for Willie Fraser and his group was they felt that
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Chapter 3: How did the Gardaí respond to the escalating violence?
Were these ne'er-do-wells that just were up to messing and trashing shops and stealing stuff? Or were they disenfranchised youth who were unhappy with the government? Take your pick. But that's...
Over the course of very quickly of the afternoon, it changed from a political demonstration into raw tuggery and violence on the street where people were being singled out and attacked, including journalists. And Gardaí, obviously, Charlie Bird, most famously, was attacked on the street and singled out for being as he... said they called him an orange bastard.
And he was quite, you know, he was saved by members of the crowd and Guardian brought to hospital. So there was that element, you probably remember yourself, of this is getting out of control. And there was no, the Orange Men were forgotten about at this stage. They were. Very, very quickly. They were gone. They were taken away from the scene.
I think they were actually brought, some of them were bussed around the city and up to Leinster House where there was a small rally up there. And that probably explains why the rioting on O'Connell Street then spread through the city. So we would have been only in one or two places, but there was like outbreaks of violence in Temple Bar, along the quays.
And most prominently, which I'd wandered into the after a while, was up on Nassau Street, which resembled the aftermath of pictures you see from the Dublin Monaghan bombings, where there were actually cars upside down on fire. Well, I remember seeing that car go on fire, actually. It was crazy.
I mean, it started on O'Connell Street and there was, so as you said, there was building work going on and they were laying paving slabs in the middle of O'Connell Street, which I don't know if they're still there today, but these big paving slabs and around all of this building work was...
this really light sort of link fence and those were taken down straight away and guys went in and picked up the paving slabs or pick up things so it was like as you said ammunition and I remember seeing somebody getting into one of the uh the machines you know the um Oh, like the cement mixers? Well, or whatever it was. It wasn't a cement mixer. It was a little truck for moving stuff.
I remember seeing some guys sitting in there trying to get that started and everything. Like, it was absolutely crazy. So they were then, I mean, that went on for, it probably went on for a couple of hours.
It did it on the O'Connell Street area because I walked up and, so the funny thing was that they were attacking guards and Charlie Bird, but there was also then people just doing their shopping. Because it's O'Connell Street. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So the riots were going on and people would pop out of Henry Street. Oh, Jesus. It's so surreal. Yeah. There were shoppers.
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Chapter 4: What factors contributed to the chaos during the riots?
And I think the guards sort of, at that point, more of them were on the scene and they kind of corralled a lot of the crowd into towards the GPO. Because I remember then they were setting fire to the bins and stuff. And there was a kind of, there was a harder core left there at that point, I think, wasn't there? Absolutely. That's where I was. Yeah.
The riot police, I suppose you'd call them, had arrived at that stage. They had pushed the rioters, I'm going to call them, not protesters, back along O'Connell Street towards O'Connell Bridge. And then there was a standoff. Yeah.
just outside the GPO where you had a line of Gardaí getting absolutely hammered out of it with missiles thrown at them, bricks, the pavement stones you mentioned, iron bars, fireworks. And at one point, and we actually put this picture on the front page of the Sunday World, it's very dramatic, petrol bombs. And one Gardaí went up in flames. Yeah. They hit him on the shield.
The petrol obviously went up. And he's seen in the picture on the front page of the Sun World, very, very graphic. Yeah. And it was called Flames of Hate, we called it. And it looked... I thought that image really caught the violence of that day because they were coming under sustained... Yeah. ...rages and attacks. And the hatred... was directed directly at them.
And I have to say, the Gardaí maintained some force of discipline to maintain their lines throughout that. And I think it was prolonged as well. It wasn't just a flash in the pan. That's where the kind of both sides dug in. Yeah, and it wasn't, obviously, initially there'd been a lot of people involved and, you know, people might have pushed against barriers and all.
But as it went on, it was a hardcore element. Now, where they would ultimately be come from was a thing that was much debated at the time. And I don't know if people ever came to conclusion. There were some people saying they were kind of, you know, like Republican, you know, people associated with dissident groups. There was other people blaming, you know, soccer hooligan crews. Absolutely.
Yeah, there was a reference in the Arizona World coverage that I was reading back on that men were seen with earpieces. Yeah. That were, you know... could have been directing the operations. We don't really know, but there was a reference to that. It seemed very, fairly more organized. Yeah, they certainly had, they certainly knew what they were doing. And then, so then I remember they started
They were held there for a while, and then I think they sort of dispersed and ran up the keys, basically, into smaller groups and ended up at Nassau Street, which again, there was a big standoff then. And, like, I can't remember when it ended, but I looked at Wikipedia page where I star prominently, and... And it said it was all over in a couple of hours.
But I definitely remember it going, like it was still seven or eight o'clock at night. That's how I remember it. I was trying to get back to the office at that stage because we had to file a copy. Yeah. You know, I think you were ringing it back. I had to go back and write it up. And that was probably five, six o'clock in the evening. And in my memory, it was still going.
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Chapter 5: How did the atmosphere shift from protest to violence?
It was getting dark in a suburb in Dublin. It wasn't on a main street. We're out in a field, effectively, and getting cornered by people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's scary. So it's funny that it's, you know, we've obviously seen a lot of public order sort of riots happening.
mostly to do with immigration over the last couple of years, not just the one in the city centre, but also at the old Crown Paints, the former Crown Paints factory, where that was, again, quite serious. But the policing of them, I think, has changed significantly. You see, we are getting more sophisticated in how we deal with them. One key element is social media. Yeah. Simple as that.
Like, you know, I can't remember exactly how much an impact social media was making 20 years ago at Love Ulster. I'm sure it was around, right? I mean, there was... Well, I don't remember exactly myself, but I mean, it was probably the Bebo sort of MySpace days if that existed, like perhaps, but it wasn't like being circulated. No.
Like what happened before in Pernambuco on November 2023, where this was like a bushfire getting inflamed by people on... X or Twitter or on social media, you know, telling people to gather at the Spire at a particular time. So they were able to be orchestrated, you know, effectively on social media. But meanwhile, just getting back to your point, the Guardia are monitoring all this. Yeah. Right.
And they have their own social media kind of observance. So they're aware of what's going on as well. They're a little bit more prepared perhaps. They probably are a little bit more prepared, but I suppose, I'm just looking back here, in 1933, there was a famous riot known as the Siege of Connolly House between anti-communist forces.
And it was right back down there on Marlborough Street, which is, of course, right beside where we are. I'm glad to say I wasn't asked that. No, you weren't, Neil. Well, you were only a young man at that stage, weren't you? Only a toddler.
So look, it's incredible to look back on it and to see how things change and the prosecutions will change again, but how things also are capable of staying the same. Absolutely. I completely expect, if you're right about the cycle element, when were we due the next one? Sometime in 20 years, 1940s or 2014. We'll still be around, no doubt. We'll no doubt be in the first flush of youth.
And we'll come back to you then, Neil. Look forward to it. Thanks, Neil. You've been listening to Crime World, a podcast from crimeworld.com. Edited and presented by me, Nicola Talent. Co-presenter, Niall Donald. Producer, Ian Mullaney. Senior writer, producer, Jenny Friel. Assistant producers, Nasa Kumiski and Chloe McPolin. Episode editor, Jason Mullaney.
If you want to subscribe for exclusive crime content and podcast specials, go to www.crimeworld.com. Have you checked out our new website, crimeworld.com, where you'll find ad-free exclusive content, including our new series, The Science of Fear, about the rise and fall of Daniel Kinnahan's right-hand man, Thomas Bomberkavanaugh.
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Chapter 6: What role did Willie Fraser play in the Love Ulster rally?
And we started off somewhere around 15, 16 million, so we've come down about 4 million. And the majority of that is the difference in the value of the drugs. Knowing the significance of him, it was a really great result to get him convicted and now to get the confiscation order against him as well and have that benefit hanging over him.
Officers who went through the rows of designer gear in Bomber's gated mansion were astonished at the sheer scale of luxury goods. The drug proceeds had been splurged on luxury and security in almost equal measure. The place was sealed, reinforced doors, bulletproof glass and cameras covering every approach. Inside was a display of wealth that would rival that of Imelda Marcos.
Money was lavished on Montclair jackets, a shoe collection worthy of a Saudi princess, and a watch collection fit for a Premier League dressing room. The list goes on. 30 pairs of identical Armani jeans, Gucci labels, a collection of handbags that a Kardashian would be proud of.
This was how the cartel's profits were laundered, through spending sprees and rolls of cash handed across the shop counters in Harrods. The definition of ill-gotten gains was hanging in wardrobes in his luxury mansion in Tamworth. Cartel members know the risk of peddling drugs across international borders.
But when officers start rifling through their six-figure wardrobes, confiscating their luxury watches and handbag collections, it does hit a nerve. A lot of criminals are quite happy, you know, getting imprisoned for the crime is part of the job.
But when you actually say, now we're going to take all your assets, that's when it gets personal because that's the reason they're committing crime is for their lifestyle. That is their job. And we are then taking it all away or getting an order to take it away. So that's when it can get quite personal.
The court's inventory of Bomber's lavish spending gave an inkling into just how far removed he'd become from the day-to-day drug trade. He oversaw the delegation of smuggling routes of finance and of enforcement to trusted lieutenants. The proceedings in Ipswich Crown Court didn't just mark the fall of Thomas Bomber Kavanagh's personal empire. They also signal something far bigger.
Bomber's collapse marks the first true fracture in what had long looked like an impenetrable underworld machine. The cartel's chief strategist, the man who kept its international supply lines running smoothly, had finally been taken down. Seen as untouchable for years, his sentence for importing tens of millions of pounds of drugs was a major shot across the bow of the Kinahan cartel.
And just two weeks after Kavanaugh's sentencing, the United States raised the stakes. And so today, the United States Department of State is pleased to announce a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the financial disruption of the KTCO or the arrest and convictions of its leaders, Christopher Vincent Kinahan, Daniel Joseph Kinahan, and Christopher Kinahan Jr.
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