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LONG BEFORE HE steered the career of Katie Taylor, promoter-manager Brian Peters used to say ‘you can’t beat a good Dub’ to move the needle for professional boxing in the Republic of Ireland.
It’s been a long time since the public threw every punch with a prizefighter from the capital. Dublin’s last truly transcendent boxing star, Bernard Dunne, enjoyed his crowning moment 17 years ago next week, his come-from-behind victory over Ricardo Cordoba at the O2 Arena the cherry on top of a day on which the Irish rugby team earlier sealed a first Grand Slam since 1948, all of it broadcast live on RTÉ.
But as they’re fondly remembered within Irish boxing, The Bernard Dunne Days — those Hunky Dorys Fight Nights on terrestrial television, the routine nights out at The Point, and ample coverage of pro boxing in mainstream Irish media — were not the norm for boxing in this country. This golden age was lightning in a bottle, the serendipitous convergence of a charismatic, world-class talent from Neilstown, a persuasive entrepreneur from Co Meath, and a national broadcaster that knew how to party.
Between 2005 and 2010, there were 33 professional boxing events held in Dublin — most of them at the National Stadium, six of them at The Point. Bernard Dunne retired following a knockout defeat to Poonsawat Krantindaenggym in late 2009. Brian Peters ducked out the following year with the country in the throes of the recession.
Between 2011 and 2015, Dublin played host to only 14 pro boxing shows. Only one of those took place at The Point — a half-arsed effort by Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom to resuscitate the career of former middleweight contender Matthew Macklin in 2014, the ticket sales for which were slow.
And so, shorn of personal investment and marketable figures, Ireland’s boxing scene had begun to stagnate well before the fatal shooting at a weigh-in at the Regency Hotel in February 2016, during which cartel leader Daniel Kinahan was an alleged target and his friend and associate, David Byrne, was murdered.
The Regency was — and often still is — wrongly recounted as a death knell for professional boxing in Dublin. In reality, two more shows took place in the capital in the months following The Regency, six of them took place the following year, and five more were staged in 2018. Indeed, Dublin actually saw more pro boxing events in the two years after the Regency than it had in the two years beforehand: Sligo businessman Leonard Gunning and his Boxing Ireland Promotions, who were distinctly unconnected to Kinahan or his blacklisted MTK Global outfit, were among those to not only provide the sport with life support, but cultivate a thriving small-hall circuit.
Well, thriving for the fans, at least. For the likes of Gunning who invested his own money to keep the sport afloat, boxing promotion was a passion project, a financial black hole, and ultimately a fool’s errand.
There was a stage around the turn of the decade when an insurance premium for a boxing event at Dublin’s National Stadium was literally 10 times more expensive than it would have been for a venue an hour and a half up the road in Newry. This was, in fact, not a consequence of the gangland violence that had pervaded the sport years earlier, but merely the cost of doing business in a country in which public-liability insurance had become prohibitively expensive in any context.
For a small-hall promoter to pay insurance, venue rental costs, Boxing Union of Ireland fees and, most pertinently, fighters’ purses, and walk away only a few grand in the red was considered cause for relief.
Another issue was that the country’s leading boxing talent was being harvested by Kinahan’s MTK Global management company, which afforded boxers far more financial security in their most precarious of occupations, and provided them with higher-profile opportunities to further their careers on televised shows in Britain and in America.
As such, the next transcendent Irish boxing star was never likely to emerge from the small-hall scene; equally, those with the potential to transcend, including several former Olympians, were unable to fight south of the border for the duration of their MTK contracts due to garda concerns and a Boxing Union of Ireland ban.
MTK also forbade their boxers from speaking with media from the Republic of Ireland due to what it claimed was “fake news” coverage of its co-founder, Daniel Kinahan. Those boxers’ profiles consequently faded south of the border.
The dissolution of MTK soon after the US-led sanctions taken against Daniel Kinahan in 2022, however, and the apparent end of the Kinahan-Hutch feud, have seen the clouds lift from over professional boxing in the capital.
With Boxing Ireland Promotions having taken its leave, former fighter Jay Byrne has picked up the mantle on the domestic scene by promoting regular, excellently produced shows at the National Stadium and elsewhere.
And whereas for years it seemed that security concerns around the 3Arena — located at the epicentre of the gangland feud — would put paid to a Katie Taylor homecoming fight (while Taylor has never had any association with MTK Global, her promoter, Eddie Hearn, had openly worked with Daniel Kinahan in a boxing context), she has since sold it out twice. If Croke Park doesn’t come off this summer, Taylor may make it a hat-trick.
Two-time Olympian Michael Conlan, who ended his contract with MTK long before things started to go south for Kinahan in 2022, headlined the 3Arena last September for what was his first ever professional fight in Dublin. California-based Cork man Callum Walsh topped a bill at the same venue 12 months earlier, and is due to return with Dana White’s Zuffa Boxing later this year.
This Saturday, meanwhile, Belfast’s Anthony Cacace will challenge Liverpool’s super-featherweight world champion Jazza Dickens for his title on The Docklands. All 8,000-odd tickets for the 3Arena were snapped up over three weeks before first bell.
In the decade leading up to the Regency shooting, pro boxing visited The Point on only seven occasions. Between 2016 and 2023, the venue had a total boxing blackout. But Saturday’s Dickens-Cacace card will mark the venue’s fifth professional boxing event under three separate international promoters in the last three years.
In the chief-support bout will be light-welterweight prospect Pierce ‘Big Bang’ O’Leary, a Sherriff Street resident who has shifted the bulk of the tickets. O’Leary is managed by Brian Peters, who believes he’s found the next ‘good Dub’.
It’s unlikely to be O’Leary’s last outing at his local hall.
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