For over 20 years Martin Cahill taunted the Gardai and frustrated their every effort to nail him. He has been linked with some of the country’s most infamous and vicious crimes of the seventies and eighties Bank robberies, tyre slashing, jewellery heists and kidnapping. But the most spectacular of all was the was the theft in May 1986 of some of the most valuable works from Sir Alfred Beit’s collection at Russborough House in Co Wicklow -The biggest art robbery in the history of the State. The story of the theft of one of the most important art collections in the world became headline news. The Garda investigation into who was behind the robbery soon began to focus in on a Dublin Criminal gang led by Martin Cahill.
Martin Cahill was not widely known to the public but the possibility of his involvement with the Russborough robbery came as no surprise to the Gardai, he had featured on their most wanted list from the early seventies as they watched his record of crimes grow. It would nearly another two years after the Russborough robbery that an RTÉ Today Tonight programme would thrust him into the public spotlight
Martin Cahill realised at a young age that his background of poverty would deprivation would exclude him of many of society’s opportunities this instilled in him a deep-seated mistrust of authority and a desire to humiliate them . He also knew that he would have to rely on his own ingenuity to make his way in the world.
From the early seventies on, the catalogue of crimes that he was accused of kept growing and growing but the Gardai were unable to unable to get sufficient evidence to connect him to any of the alleged crimes, He has been accused of so many crimes, some quite colourful, some quite brutal, The attempted murder of the state forensic scientist James O’Donovan, and the shooting of a civil servant who wrote to him about stopping his dole and the kidnapping of banker Jim Lacey – and yet he was convicted of so few of them.
All through the eighties he played a cat and mouse game with the Gardai, a game which he mainly won. He loved courting the media with his colourful antics, displaying his Mickey Mouse boxers and laughing at authority. His desperation to get rid of the Beit paintings was no laughing matter for the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland with whom he got involved with and this would eventually lead to his brutal murder in the south Dublin suburb of Ranelagh in an August afternoon in 1994.
Presenter / reporter: Padraig O Driscoll
Producer: Aifric Ni Chianáin