Children played 'feud games' amid Hutch-Kinahan tensions

Garda Chief Superintendent Pat Leahy. Credit: Crispin Rodwell

Children were playing gangland ‘feud games’ in the schoolyard during the height of the murderous Kinahan-Hutch feud, according to the senior officer who led the garda battle against the gangs.

Pat Leahy, who retires as an assistant commissioner after 38 years in the organisation, also said that teenagers “groomed” into gangs by the lure of wealth and power often end up either “perpetrating violence or being victims of it”.