LAST UPDATE | 5 hrs ago

THE DAUGHTER OF Noel Kirwan, an innocent man who was murdered by the Kinahan organised crime group, has told cartel lieutenant Sean McGovern that her father would be offended to have been killed by “somebody as stupid as you”.

Donna Kirwan, whose 62-year-old father was shot dead outside his home in December 2016, addressed McGovern directly in her written statement to the court.

Ms Kirwan suggested that McGovern (40) and five others convicted for their roles in the murder plot must feel “very stupid”.

Pointing out that McGovern was linked to the murder by DNA, mobile phones, CCTV and other evidence, she questioned how he thought he was going to get away with it.

“Who put you lot in charge?” she asked. “There’s not an ounce of intelligence between you. My dad would be offended somebody as stupid as you killed him.”

Ms Kirwan said McGovern would have seen the “fear and panic” in his own family after he was shot and injured during the Regency Hotel attack in February 2016. “Why choose to inflict that on us?” she asked. “It was Christmas, you should have been out buying presents for your kids, not organising the murder of a grandfather.”

She said McGovern had destroyed their lives, but also his own and asked how he felt watching his father’s funeral on a laptop in Dubai, where he fled to escape justice in Ireland.

The three-judge Special Criminal Court today heard evidence relating to McGovern’s role in the murder of Noel Kirwan and the attempted murder of James ‘Mago’ Gately.

Det Supt David Gallagher told the court that the background to the offending was a ‘murderous feud’ between the Kinahan and Hutch criminal organisations.

He said the organisations had initially worked as a single criminal network before a falling out in 2014 which resulted in a number of violent acts in Ireland and Spain. In September 2014, Gary Hutch was shot in Spain by the Kinahans, who believed he had been involved in an earlier shooting.

The feud escalated after Gary Hutch’s murder before a “watershed moment” when members of the Hutch gang, some dressed as gardaí, stormed a boxing weigh-in at the Regency Hotel in Dublin on 5 February 2016.

They shot and killed David Byrne, a senior Kinahan gang member. McGovern and one other person were shot and injured, Gallagher said.

The Kinahans then targeted Gately because they believed he was one of the armed attackers at the Regency.

Gallagher detailed how the Kinahan gang brought tracking devices from the Spy Shop in Leeds in the United Kingdom to Dublin.

They placed trackers on Gately’s partner’s car and on a car belonging to his sister. When they later tracked Gately down to an address in Belfast, McGovern and an accomplice travelled north to place a tracker on his car.

The Kinahans then decided to employ the services of Estonian “hitman for hire” Imre Arakas, who arrived in Ireland in early April 2017.

McGovern used a secure messaging service for Blackberry phone users to relay information about Gately’s movements in Belfast and the layout of the car park outside his home. That information was subsequently sent to Arakas.

In messages between Arakas and someone using the handle ‘Bon New’, Arakas complained that where Gately was staying provided “nowhere to hide” and suggested that a “silencer would be good”. He also said that from looking at pictures on Google, it could be “one shot in the head from distance and that’s it”.

Bon New told Arakas that they had a tracker on Gately’s car so they would know when he was heading home. Bon New added: “When he is ten minutes away, we get in position. He parks in the same position always.”

Gardaí arrested Arakas and found the incriminating messages on his phone. After Arakas’s arrest, Gallagher said McGovern and others became concerned that there might be an informer or ‘rat’ in their ranks.

When Bon New suggested they needed to “change tactics”, McGovern replied: “One hundred per cent, or we’re all going to jail here.”

Gallagher said that he has worked in criminal investigations for 32 years. From sources and his personal knowledge of the structure, workings and activities of criminal organisations, he said he can assert the existence of a Kinahan organised criminal group.

The group has been involved in a “murderous feud” with the Hutch organised crime group, he said, while at the same time it engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering on an international scale.

The gang has a hierarchical structure, he said, with a core leadership overseeing a cell structure which divides the tasks of money-laundering, drug trafficking and violence.

McGovern’s only previous convictions were for minor road traffic matters between 2009 and 2011, he said. He was arrested in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates before being extradited to Ireland following a request by the Irish authorities.

McGovern’s chief role in the conspiracy to murder James Gately was to direct the surveillance of the target by controlling the tracking device placed on the target’s car and pass the information to others.

The Kinahan organisation used an encrypted messaging service available on Blackberry phones to communicate. Each member had usernames or handles, with McGovern going by the name Knife, he said.

In one text exchange two days after the Regency shooting, McGovern told another senior Kinahan gang member identified as ‘Cap’: “They targeted us, they wanted you,” and swore on his baby’s life: “I’m not stopping now.”

They also discussed going after other relatives of the Hutch family while Cap described the Hutch gang as ‘scum’ and said he would not stop until they are “all gone”.

In a later exchange when the Kinahans were targeting James Gately, McGovern described Gately as a weasel and added: “All weasels get caught out in the end.”

Under cross-examination, Gallagher told Michael Bowman SC, defending, that McGovern was a “senior lieutenant operating on the ground in Ireland” at the time of the attempted assassination of Gately and when Noel Kirwan was murdered.

He said McGovern was at the third tier of the organisation, with several people above him. While McGovern was directing others, he also received instructions from people further up. Part of his job was to feed information up the channel, the detective said.

Det Sgt Donal Daly told Dean Kelly SC, for the Director of Public Prosecutions, that the Kinahans targeted Noel Kirwan after he was photographed in a national newspaper at Eddie Hutch’s funeral. Hutch was a brother of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch.

Daly said Kirwan had no involvement in criminality but had known the Hutch family all his life.

The detective said the Kinahans saw Noel Kirwan as a ‘soft target’ because he had no involvement in the feud, was unaware of any threat to his life and had taken no measures for his own security.

Noel Kirwan was known affectionately to his friends and family as Duck Egg and in one message exchange, McGovern suggested “putting the Teeth on the duck, to get his confidence back.”

Daly said gardaí interpreted this as meaning that McGovern wanted a gang member known as “Teeth” to be assigned the job of executing Noel Kirwan “with a view to getting his confidence back”. The witness suggested that “Teeth” may have failed some previous assignments.

Gardaí were able to trace McGovern’s movements to show that he was present at an apartment in the Beacon South Quarter in Sandyford in Dublin at all times when a laptop was being used from that location to control the devices used to track Noel Kirwan’s car.

He said McGovern’s DNA was also found on the laptop used to control the tracker, which gardaí found following a search of an apartment at Beacon South Quarter.

McGovern’s fingerprint was also found on an instruction manual that came with the same tracker.

Mr Justice Patrick McGrath, presiding, adjourned the sentencing hearing to this Friday for completion of the evidence and pleas in mitigation by McGovern’s lawyers.

Earlier this year McGovern, with a previous address at Kildare Road, Crumlin, Dublin 12 pleaded guilty to directing the activities of a criminal organisation between 20 October and 22 December 2016, both dates inclusive both within and outside the State, in relation to the murder of Christopher aka Noel Kirwan.

McGovern also admitted directing the activities of a criminal organisation between 17 October 2015 and 6 April 2017, both dates inclusive both within and outside the State, in connection with the surveillance of James Gately in preparation for the commission of an indictable offence.

Victim impact statement

In her statement, which was read into the record by prosecuting counsel Maddie Grant BL, Donna Kirwan said she and her brother Christopher spent the Christmas after their father was murdered “looking at each other in complete shock”. She said it is hard to explain the impact of losing their dad, “our friend and our safety net”.

She said he had worked “day and night” to provide his family with everything they needed. While some of his friends had decided to make easy money by selling drugs, she said her dad “chose to work for a living because that’s how he was raised”.

She described her father as a “kind man who would give you the clothes off his back” and a private man who lived for his family.

She told McGovern that he will not get the justice he deserves because some day he will get to live a normal life again with his children.

“We will never have that,” she said, adding: “It is not the people killed who suffer, it’s those left behind.”