Martin Cahill

Cahill and his gang stole gold and diamonds with a value of over IR£2 million (€2.55 million; €6.35 million in 2021, adjusted for inflation) from O'Connor's jeweller's in Harolds Cross (1983); the jeweller's subsequently was forced to close, with the loss of more than one hundred jobs. He was also involved in stealing some of the world's most valuable paintings from Russborough House (1986) and extorting restaurants and hot dog vendors in Dublin's nightclub district.

Cahill's eldest daughter, Frances Cahill, released a book in 2008 entitled Martin Cahill, My Father.

In 1984, Cahill had bought his growing family a house on the Cowper Downs development, on the southside of Dublin, paying IR£80,000 cash despite having no paid formal employment since he left his first and only job in 1969. On 1 May 2005, under an agreement with his widow Frances, the CAB seized and subsequently sold the property.

In 2004, a book written by Matthew Hart was released entitled The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art, which depicted the story of the Russborough House heist in 1986 and Cahill's involvement.

The 2003 film Veronica Guerin implies that John Gilligan ordered Cahill's murder. In the film Gilligan and Traynor are not portrayed as Cahill's subordinates. Instead, Gilligan appears as a rival mob boss and Traynor as a lower-level associate.

After a Roman Catholic requiem mass, Martin Cahill was buried in consecrated ground at Mount Jerome Cemetery. In 2001, his gravestone was vandalised and broken in two.

Ken Stott starred as Cahill in a 1999 BBC drama, Vicious Circle written by Kieran Prendiville

Cahill was a diabetic. Cahill was married to Frances Lawless with whom he fathered five children. However, it was also widely rumored that Cahill had, with Frances' approval, a second partner in Frances' younger sister Tina Lawless, with whom it is believed he fathered four further children. This polygamous domestic arrangement was depicted in the 1998 biopic of Cahill's life, The General.

In 1998 John Boorman (who had lived in Ireland for nearly 20 years) directed a biographical film titled The General, starring Brendan Gleeson as Cahill. The film won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. It was based on a book by Irish crime journalist Paul Williams, who was also the crime editor of the Irish tabloid the Sunday World. Boorman himself once had his home burgled by Cahill, who stole the gold record which Boorman had won for the Deliverance soundtrack. This incident is depicted in the film.

Following the 1996 murder of journalist Veronica Guerin, the Dáil set up the Criminal Assets Bureau, to seize assets of those who were both convicted of crimes, and also seemingly had no obvious means of income. The CAB was set up to focus mainly on high-profile drug dealers but had an open approach to all convicted criminals. Cahill denied that he was ever involved in drug dealing; however, his brother Peter was convicted of supplying heroin in the 1980s.

With all gang members from the Lacey kidnapping released on bail, on 18 August 1994, Cahill left the house at which he had been staying at Swan Grove and began driving to a local shop. Upon reaching a road junction (where Oxford Road meets Charleston Road) he was repeatedly shot in the face and upper torso and died almost instantly. The gunman, who was armed with a .357 Magnum revolver, jumped on a motorbike, and disappeared from the scene.

Within hours of Cahill's death, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) claimed responsibility in a press release. The reasons cited were Cahill's alleged involvement with a Portadown unit of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The unit in question had recently attempted a bomb attack on a south Dublin pub which was hosting a Sinn Féin fund-raiser on 21 May 1994. The UVF operatives were halted by the doorman Martin Doherty. In the ensuing struggle Doherty, who the IRA subsequently announced was a Volunteer in their Dublin Brigade, was shot dead. The IRA further alleged that Cahill had been involved in selling the stolen Vermeer paintings to the UVF Mid-Ulster Brigade led by Billy Wright, alias "King Rat". The Mid-Ulster Brigade then fenced the paintings for money, which they used to fund arms trafficking from South Africa under apartheid. This act allegedly sealed Cahill's fate, and put him at the top of an IRA hit list. In a later statement, the IRA said that it was Cahill's "involvement with and assistance to pro-British death squads which forced us to act".

In early 1993, John "The Coach" Traynor, met his boss Cahill, to provide him with inside information about the inner workings of the National Irish Bank (NIB) head office and branch at College Green, Dublin. Traynor told Cahill that the bank regularly held more than €10 million in cash in the building. The plan was to abduct NIB CEO Jim Lacey, his wife and four children and take them to an isolated hiding place. There, they would be held with fellow gang member Jo Jo Kavanagh, acting as a "hostage", who would frighten Lacey into handing over every penny stored in the bank's vaults.

On 1 November 1993, Cahill's gang seized Lacey and his wife outside his home in Blackrock. Whilst they were held at Lacey's home, Kavanagh was brought in and tied up, telling the family that he had been abducted two weeks before. On 2 November, Kavanagh drove Lacey to College Green to collect the ransom money, with Lacey eventually withdrawing IR£300,000 from an accessible cash machine. After the cash had been handed over to the gang, Kavanagh told Gardaí that the pair had been kidnapped and forced to take part in a robbery.

In February 1988, a Today Tonight report identified Cahill as the man behind the O'Donovan bomb plot, the 1986 Beit (Russborough House) robbery and the robbery of O'Connors jewellery depot. As a result, PD leader Dessie O'Malley raised in the Dáil the revelations that Cahill owned such expensive property in Cowper Downs, despite having never worked, remarking that Cahill must have needed the extra wall space to "hang his artwork by the Dutch masters."

As a result, the Gardaí set up a Special Surveillance Unit (SSU), nicknamed "Tango Squad", to specifically target and monitor Cahill's gang on a permanent, 24/7 basis. Cahill was given the callsign Tango-1. The SSU also placed a direct presence on the estate at Cowper Downs, positioning a surveillance unit in the home of developer John Sisk, whose house backed onto Cahill's. Following the arrest of two of Cahill's associates in an attempted robbery, and resentful of the large Garda presence near his home, Cahill retaliated by ordering his men to slash the tyres of 197 cars on the night of 26 February 1988 (including 90 belonging to his neighbours in Cowper Downs). Cahill returned home to find his own Mercedes-Benz smashed.

Fearing the increasing role that forensic science could play in detecting his robberies, in May 1982 Cahill had a bomb placed under the car of chief forensic scientist, James O'Donovan, partly disabling him.

In 1978, Dublin Corporation began preparing to demolish Hollyfield Buildings. Cahill, then serving a four-year suspended prison sentence, fought through the courts to prevent his neighbourhood's destruction. Even after the tenements were demolished, he continued to live in a pitched tent on the site. Finally, Ben Briscoe, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, paid a visit to his tent and persuaded him to move into a new house in a more upscale district of Rathmines.

With his brothers, he continued to commit multiple burglaries in the affluent neighbourhoods nearby, at one point even robbing the Garda Síochána depot for confiscated firearms. The Cahill brothers soon turned to armed robbery, and by the early 1970s Gardaí at the Dublin Central Detective Unit (CDU) had identified the Cahill brothers as major criminals, when they teamed up with the notorious Dunne gang in Crumlin to rob security vans conveying cash from banks.

He was born in a slum district in Grenville Street in Dublin's north inner city, the second of twelve surviving children of Patrick Cahill, a lighthouse-keeper, and Agnes Sheehan. By the time he was in school, Martin and his older brother John were stealing food to supplement the family's income. In 1960, the family was moved to Captain's Road, Crumlin, as part of the Dublin slum clearances. Martin was sent to a Christian Brothers School (CBS) on the same road where he lived but was soon playing truant and committing frequent burglaries with his brothers. At 15, he attempted to join the Royal Navy, but was rejected, allegedly after offering to break into houses for them and because he had a criminal record.

Martin "The General" Cahill (23 May 1949 – 18 August 1994) was an Irish crime boss from Dublin. He masterminded a series of burglaries and armed robberies, and was shot and killed while out on bail for kidnapping charges. The Provisional Irish Republican Army took responsibility for Cahill's murder but no one was ever arrested or formally charged.