Why Gerry Ryan's son is well placed to tell the tale of our love-hate affair with the Monk and the Dublin underworld
On its website, the Creative Director of Dublin’s Glass Mask Theatre company, Rex Ryan, throws down a gauntlet to audiences.Step out of your comfort zone and “confront the mayhem of life…”There can be few lives filled with more of that than the charmed existence of Gerry Hutch.Ryan – son of late RTE legend Gerry Ryan – will attempt to bring some of it to the stage of the Ambassador Theatre later this month with his one-man show 'The Monk'.I saw him play the role when he first staged it in Glass Mask Theatre, a space for about 50 people on Dawson Street, last summer.Given his own middle-class background, and the lazy tag of ‘nepo babies’ that sometimes attaches to the children of the famous, I had prepared myself to be cynical.I was happy to be proved wrong.It’s a great tale, well told. In part due to Ryan’s own skills as an actor.But it’s his storytelling and writing in bringing some of the many faces of the Monk onto the stage that makes the show ring with truth.READ MORE: Gerry Hutch admits he’s 'looking forward' to watching theatrical play about his lifeIn one of those unlikely twists in the Hutch folklore, Ryan grew up in leafy Clontarf as a friend of the Monk’s children.For an actor, it surely allows him to draw on some unique experiences. He must have seen the man who spawned a thousand headlines in moments when the masks he presents to the rest of the world might not have been fixed.Hutch himself has given the piece his blessing and says he is looking forward to seeing it.Seasoned Monk watchers can hang on each word of the play for some insight beyond what we know from the cartoon caricature or the merciless spotlight of a 52-day murder trial in the Special Criminal Court.For some answers to a question that has fascinated many for decades - who is the real Gerry Hutch?The Monk had a meteoric criminal rise that saw him go from robbing bottles of TK lemonade to being named by the Gardai as the mastermind behind two of the biggest cash heists in the State’s history – neither of which he was ever charged with.After coughing up a seven-figure settlement to the Criminal Assets Bureau, it looked like he would achieve the dream that eluded many of his peers, and retire peacefully under the Spanish sun.Events ten years ago today on a February Friday on the northside of Dublin would change all that.They would morph Hutch, the cheeky criminal who got away, into a semi-mythical figure on the streets of his native city, like ‘Bang Bang’ or ‘Zozimus’, Hutch became the Teflon Thief. The man they couldn’t hang. Blessed with a Midas touch and nine lives.Various other accounts paint him as anything from a criminal godfather to a well-meaning family patriarch who stepped in to save his clan in its darkest hour.In his hometown he became a kind of gangland ghost. An inner-city Keyser Soze always one step ahead of the rivals who wanted him dead.Watching Rex Ryan bring his story to the stage, my own thoughts turned to those other ghosts in the drama of the Monk’s life. Those who paid the price as he ducked the many bullets with the Hutch name on them.The family, the friends, the neighbours, the innocents who make up most of the official 18-man toll of the Kinahan-Hutch feud.There are others who could be added. The children left fatherless. Cousins, nephews, friends who witnessed the horrors.Detective Superintendent Colm Fox, who succumbed to the stress of the job of bringing those behind the Regency attack to justice and was described by a colleague this week as the 19th victim of the feud..Only last week in the courts another letter was handed over in defence of a brutal assault that laid the seeds at the door of the trauma inflicted by the gangland war that littered north Dublin with bodies.We owe it to those ghosts to strip away the myth from reality. To remember what it was really all about. And how it all started.Former Garda Assistant Commissioner Michael O’Sullivan, who was one of the first investigators on the scene, is in no doubt.Gerry Hutch was found not guilty of the feud murder of David Byrne. But the organised crime gang that bears his family name was far from innocent.The war didn’t begin as a feud between rival mobs but as a split in one.READ MORE: Hutch gang's 'greatest failure' achieved nothing except more deaths, top Garda saysSome in the Hutch faction of the cartel like Gerry’s nephew Gary saw an opening to take over the profits of Dublin’s drug trade if they removed the Kinahans from the top of the pile.Greed and money - same as it ever was. Which of course hints at another share of the blame.As the well-heeled theatre-goers gather in the foyer of the Ambassador - in the heart of the neighbourhood torn apart by the feud – maybe some of them might sense it.If the bigger, squalid story has an underlying theme it is the middle-class addiction to cocaine – the fuel behind the exploding powderkeg of the Kinahan-Hutch feud.A few years earlier it would also be complicit in the death of Rex Ryan’s own beloved father Gerry, who a coroner found died from heart arrhythmia after using the drug.One more ghost that hovers on the stage of the complicated tale of Dublin’s love-hate affair with the underworld.And another reason his son is well-placed to take audiences out of that comfort zone for a look into the abyss at all the mayhem.Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.
