A shot at Coffey

Paul Coffey had a lucky escape on Sunday, 14 March last on Michael Street, when, at around 9:30pm, a gunman, probably with the McCarthy-Dundon gang, fired at least two shots at him before making his escape in a old Toyota Corolla.

The target of the shooting on Michael Street is originally from Derryfada, Clonlara and later of Craeval Park, Moyross. Paul Coffey was the driver for Kieran Keane and Philip Collopy (both now themselves dead) when they murdered Eddie Ryan in the Moose Bar on 12 November 2000.  This murder is regarded as sparking off the intense feud that has seen some 20 deaths in a decade.

That Sunday night back in 2000, Coffey was out driving with his partner Michelle Ryan, when Keane and Collopy asked him to drive them somewhere.  They took him to a coal yard where he got into a large dark car and drove the two to the Moose Bar on Cathedral Place. While en route, Keane made a quick mobile call to his spotter to confirm Eddie Ryan was in the bar.

The Moose Bar

Collopy and Keane entered the bar wearing balaclavas, shooting Eddie Ryan 11 times, also hitting a mother and daughter standing next to him.  Eddie Ryan was effectively a dead man walking after his gun jammed when he tried to kill Christy Keane just two days earlier. After the shooting in the Moose Bar, Coffey managed to stall the getaway car outside but eventually got it going and, after dropping of the two gunmen, doused the car in petrol and torched it out in Corbally. 

Less than a month later, on 10 December 2000, Coffey was arrested in connection with the Eddie Ryan murder.  His partner Michelle Ryan, a relation of Eddie's, originally told the Guards she wouldn’t cover for Coffey any more, but later refused to sign any statement incriminating him. 

Coffey’s first murder trial, in April 2002, had to be abandoned after firstly, a juror went missing and later, one of the main Garda witnesses was seriously ill and had to be hospitalised.  

Paul Coffey - his lawyer says he has low I.Q.

The subsequent murder trial, in July 2003, was halted when the charge of murder was withdrawn and Coffey agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter.  He was sentenced to 15 years, with 7 years of this suspended.  Judge Henry Abbott took into account the fact that Coffey, according to his Defence Counsel, had a low IQ and was by no means the mastermind of the operation.  Coffey himself insisted that he only realised what was actually going on when Keane and Collopy put their balaclavas on outside the Moose Bar.  The Judge also considered that Coffey suffered from depression, abused drugs and claimed had been sexually abused in his youth. 

Coffey’s prison sentence wasn’t entirely uneventful.  In 2006, he was involved in a serious fight with another Limerick gang member, the one-legged Roy Woodland.  Woodland slashed Coffey’s face with a blade from his ear to his mouth.  Woodland, like Coffey, would be a minion in the Keane-Collopy gang, so their disagreement was probably not feud-related, unless the Keane’s were still annoyed that Coffey had, initially at least, so readily named names to the Guards back in 2000.

More recently, in June 2008, Coffey was caught with a pink Sony Ericsson phone in his cell in Limerick Prison and, after a trial at the Limerick District Court, had three months added to his sentence.

Coffey’s release in January 2010 attracted plenty of publicity.  'Notorious gang killer released from prison' was the headline in the Irish Independent, while Fine Gael’s spokesman on Justice, Charlie Flanagan, lambasted the Government in a Dáil debate on gangland crime, highlighting Coffey’s case as a reason for a minimum mandatory 25 year sentence for murder. 

This wasn’t the first time Paul Coffey’s criminal record became a political football.  In June 1996, Coffey, then just 19, was on trial for driving a stolen car while drunk, uninsured and serving a driving ban. Judge Gerard Haughton, presiding at Limerick District Court, condemned then Justice Minister Nora Owen from the bench.  The judge asked, “Why should I bother sentencing criminals at all?”, if people like Paul Coffey were free on temporary release after just 5 weeks into a 10 month sentence for a similar offence.  Apparently, in this instance, Coffey was so drunk he barely recalled the incident.  Judge Haughton sentenced Coffey to 11 months and banned him from driving until 2011, meaning Coffey was driving while disqualified when he drove Kieran Keane and Philip Collopy to the Moose Bar in November 2000.

Nora Owen 'released' Paul Coffey in 1996