Not all the crooks in Limerick are tinkers but yeah they have a very heavy influence cos lets face it the clandestine nature of the gypsy world lends itself to criminality. They police themselves, they don't trust the Cops (or as Dubliners say) "the shades" and they are reared to be physically tough and to box and go toe to toe bare knuckle style.

Part of my family history traces back to Limerick and the rest to Dublin and South Armagh so I know the mentality there and even though its a relatively small place with a population of 90,000 it has a raging drug and gang problem for a place of its size. I haven't been to Ireland since 2009 though so things may have changed. The IRA according to news reports do have some kind of foothold there so guess I could have been misinformed. Or maybe things have just changed since last I heard.

However South Armagh is a different story. You really have to be in and around the families in South Armagh to be trusted in South Armagh. They call it Bandit Country for a reason. One of them is that they carry out their own business and they don't really mingle that well with outsiders. I only went there once as a young child but it left a lasting impression believe me. These guys are serious pros and they wouldn't use the travellers for anything that needed to be kept zipped tight. The tinkers have many qualities but professionalism ain't one of them. The South Armagh crew are the top pros in the IRA. Even today they still pull armed roadblocks in the area.

Dublin has always had crooks that wouldn't tow the line. My cousin who lives in out in Florida used to have a property in the north of Dublin and he was going to his home one day and saw Martin Cahill was slumped in the wheel pumped full of lead. He did business with the wrong people and wouldn't bow down to the IRA and they made an example of him. The movie about him is called 'the General'. The IRA whacked him out front of his home.

What you will find is when it comes to military operations the Real IRA won't use travelers. For one thing their first loyalty is to their clan and not only that they usually come with lots of baggage and infighting.

They can't be within an inch of each other without breaking out in a fist fighting they are prone to being very unstable. Very useful for day to day business and for stuff like extortion of businesses which is still big business in Ireland but also a major pain in the butt cos you just don't know where you stand with em.

One minute they with you, they against you and the next minute they fighting with their enemies against another clan. Or are they gonna get big ideas and come back at you? it's too much. That's why only the IRA can really have the presence to deal with them at all.

The IRA is different culture and they use all walks of life. The underworld is heavily influenced by the tinkers but the IRA wouldn't think anything of moving in on a traveller site to collect extortion. It could be they used another traveller clan as muscle to do this as well which is one of the perks of having a clan on call. They done this recently last summer to a famous traveller family from Ireland.

Basically their site was bulldozed down and it was linked to the IRA who denied it. But get this these guys support the cause so make of that what you will. Sometimes it's just about the money I guess and some of these clans have plenty of it. The IRA deny this and say it was a rogue element using their name without permission but anyway just to give a bit of balance but it happened.