A former Sinn Féin councillor has told the Special Criminal Court that Gerard Hutch told him that he and another Dublin criminal shot David Byrne dead at the Regency Hotel and that Mr Hutch was not happy about it.
The court is hearing evidence from Jonathan Dowdall, who is serving four years for helping a criminal gang murder the Kinahan gangster David Byrne at the Regency Hotel in February 2016.
Mr Hutch, from the Paddocks in Clontarf, has pleaded not guilty to the murder.
Dowdall has also testified that he handed over a key card for a room at the hotel used by one of the gunmen the night before the murder.
He commenced his evidence from the jury box this morning with three prison officers and three gardaí, two of whom were armed, beside him.
Jonathan Dowdall and the Hutchs
Mr Dowdall (pictured below) said he was married with four children and was originally from Ballybough in Dublin's north inner city.
He said he knew the Hutch family, firstly through his mother who was a street trader and a close friend of Gerard Hutch’s wife; he was also involved with the boxing club Corinthians.
He left school, worked with the Post Office, went back to school at night, did an apprenticeship and became an electrician.
He set up a company in 2007 and employed 20 staff in total. It was called Dowdall Electrical, trading as APCO. He sponsored tracksuits for children in boxing and soccer.
Background to feud
He outlined the background, as he knew it, to the Hutch-Kinahan feud and that Gary Hutch was shot dead in Spain in 2015 because the Kinahans believed he was an "informer".
He said he was told that Gary's brother Patrick had tried to kill Daniel Kinahan and an agreement had been reached for €200,000 to be handed over and Patrick to be shot in Drumcondra as punishment.
He said Mr Kinahan shot Patrick, who was then taken to the Mater Hospital.
He said the agreement was that after that, Gary was "to be let go his own way," but that the Kinahans reneged on the deal.
Further demands were put on the family, Gary Hutch was shot dead and other family members were "approached".
Meeting the Dissidents
"It was getting out of hand," he said, "I was asked could I approach people, Republican people. It wasn't provisional people, it was dissident people. Patsy asked me."
"At that time it could have been fixed I thought," he said. "So I went and spoke to someone. I did agree. I wasn’t gone on the idea. There was so many innocent lives at stake. I would have tried to help any other family in that position, you couldn’t be going to the guards."
He said in January 2016 he met a guy known as both "Wee" and "Fish", whose name was Paul, and Shane Rowan - a convicted IRA man who was subsequently jailed for seven years after he was caught with the three assault rifles used in the gun attack at the Regency.
"I told them the background of the feud, it wasn't full on at that stage," he said. He said there were threats to the family and he asked if they would be able to contact people to sit down and come to some sort of agreement, "to stop the whole thing, a witnessed agreement, put everything to bed".
He also said he was supposed to meet a man called Kevin Tyrone but he did not turn up or at the next meeting on 4 February. He went with his father, Patrick, who he said received a phone call on the way home from Patsy Hutch asking him had he booked a room for him at the Regency Hotel.
Dowdall said he had not known anything about it but there was nothing unusual in this as he often booked flights and other things for Patsy on his Visa card.
He said he rang his wife, who booked the hotel room and he and his father drove home to collect ID before going to the Regency to pay for the room and pick up the keycard. The room was used that night and the following day by one of the gunmen, the late dissident republican, Kevin Murray, who was known as 'Flat Cap’.
Dowdall said that he rang Gerard Hutch's brother Patsy and told him that he and his father were on their way to his house with the key card. However Dowdall said he was told to go to Richmond Road in Drumcondra where they pulled in at a garage.
He said Gerard Hutch came up on his own to the passenger side of the Toyota Land Cruiser and his father Patrick gave him the keycard.
Dowdall said he was "not expecting him to be there. He was wearing a dark-coloured coat, I didn’t see the car he was driving. He just said thanks and headed off."
A few days later after the murder, he said Gerard Hutch contacted him and they met in a park in Whitehall in Dublin. The Sunday World had taken a picture of two of the gunmen running from the hotel, one of them was in drag, the other was Kevin Murray. They met at around 11 or 11.30am.
"When I arrived Gerard was there, on his own," he said. "He asked did I see the papers, The Sunday World. I had seen it and told him who I thought the person looked like, young Patrick, and he said the same, the person in drag. He said Patrick was in the photograph."
"He was in a panic," Dowdall said of Mr Hutch, "he wasn't like any other time I had seen him. I believe there was people after calling to Neddy’s house." Neddy was the nickname for Eddie Hutch, Gerard Hutch’s brother. He was shot dead at his home in Dublin’s north inner city three days after the murder of David Byrne.
Dowdall also told the Special Criminal Court that Gerard Hutch told him he and another Dublin criminal shot David Byrne dead at the Regency Hotel and that he was not happy about it.
"He said it was them at the hotel," Dowdall said. "He told me he was upset, he’s not happy about the shooting of the young lad David Byrne and David Byrne being killed. He said him and Mago Gately shot David Byrne."
James 'Mago’ Gately survived at least two attempts on his life in Belfast and in Dublin and several people have been jailed by the Special Criminal Court for their roles in the crimes, including the Estonian hitman Imre Arakas.
Dowdall said that Hutch was uncharacteristically upset at the meeting.
"He was very agitated. He wasn’t himself. I think he knew the s**t was hitting the fan. He seemed genuine, genuinely upset over killing the lad and paranoid about people watching him in the park," Dowdall said.
He said Mr Hutch told him there was going to be a lot of innocent people killed, family and friends. He said people were knocking on family members’ doors. Dowdall said Mr Hutch asked him to contact people in the North.
"I told him it was a waste of time," he said, "nobody was going to get involved now. I had no intention of contacting anyone. I was worried over a room being booked. Like money, if you’re told and it goes missing, it comes back on you."
The room Dowdall said was "something I shouldn’t have been told and I wish I wasn’t told".
"I just wanted out of the park," he said.
"If I’d have known that room was involved, when guards ringing, we were never told anybody stayed in that room to do with the Regency," he said.
Kevin 'Flat Cap' Murray
Dowdall said that after the murder he was contacted by a dissident republican he had met in the North who told him he had heard Gerard Hutch had been involved in the Regency attack.
He said he did not know the gunman known as Kevin ‘Flat Cap’ Murray, but the dissidents did not know that and they asked how Kevin Murray was involved with the Hutchs.
Dowdall said there had been "a falling out" a few years before between them and Murray but that this "didn’t look good for me".
"I was being put under pressure to find out how he was involved," he said "I went up to stop all this and then this happens."
He said he subsequently found out while he was serving a sentence in Portlaoise Prison that Murray got involved through someone else. He said there was "phone evidence between Kevin Murray and another person, he was friends with a person who worked in a pub. Kevin Murray came through him".
Patsy and the van
Dowdall said he trusted Patsy Hutch, he knew his wife and family well and his children worked at Dowdall's mother’s stall.
"I always got on with Patsy, trained at the club with him," he said. "He did carpets. We got him to fix carpets and he got us domestic work. When I first started he got me domestic [electrician] work, then got more commercial and industrial."
In the early days when his business had cash flow problems, Patsy lent Dowdall money to pay his staff while he awaited payment for jobs such as rewiring the homes of older people on grants.
"I had to wait a long time [for payment]," he said, "if I was stuck for wages, I could borrow four to five thousand and pay back. Three or four times it happened."
Dowdall said when the tax laws changed in 2009 it meant a person couldn’t tax a commercial vehicle unless they set up as sole trader. He said this affected Patsy Hutch’s work so Dowdall said Patsy asked him to tax Patsy’s van in his name, so he did.
"There was never any issue," he said. "First a blue one, then a silver one, taxed, insured in the company name, used for carpets, never a problem with speeding."
Dowdall also said that Patsy Hutch's van was registered in his company's name and that he was asked to lie about it. The court heard earlier that the van had allegedly been used in the murder and Dowdall said that Patsy said he was afraid to drive it because people knew it was his van and he’d be shot in it.
He also said that he was asked to lie about the van and say he had it in his possession.
"I was being asked to say I had the van," he said. "I wouldn’t say that.
"At that time I was under serious stress taking tablets to sleep, I couldn't sleep and couldn’t go to work. I was taking tablets from the time I met Gerard in [the] park until something happened in hotel. My life wasn’t my own."
The trial continues tomorrow.
