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between their ears. They were just fellas who got involved in crime but would never have made much money. But when these were introduced to people like Gilligan, who could scheme long term, the prison system effectively gave him foot soldiers,’ he added.
    While Gilligan resisted joining an established criminal gang, he certainly learned from them, particularly the concept of how to run a paramilitary organisation. He watched the INLA and how they operated, and listened to Dessie O’Hare’s ramblings about revolutionary and guerrilla warfare. Although most of what he heard was defunct nonsense, Gilligan did gain insight into how groups like the INLA hand-picked men to perform certain tasks. He also learned about how to structure a criminal organisation into cells.
    ‘The top criminal brains were housed on the one landing, and so they compared notes. That’s where Gilligan came into his own. He sat back and identified people in any particular area, whether it be someone with a van, someone with a yard, someone who could get registration numbers checked. He met them in Portlaoise and recruited them,’ explained Kenna.
    It is easy to conjecture how this happened. Kenna saw Gilligan as having a remarkable ability to learn from others. ‘He could pick everybody’s brains, even without having to talk to them, by just sitting there and listening to them. He used everyone’s skills. He was like a personnel manager, for want of a better word. He was good at managing people on a one-to-one basis for a bigger picture. And he obviously did that very effectively.’
    High-profile prisoners serving sentences usually avoid each other in prison to lessen confrontations. Portlaoise Prison, however, forced some of the State’s most hardened adversaries to talk.
    ‘You had 40 top-profile prisoners confined in a small space that couldn’t break out, control, subvert or bully anyone. You had the most unruly criminals in the State, and republicans keeping them in line. Did they run amuck?’ Kenna asked rhetorically.
    True to form, most of the criminals on E1 did keep to themselves. Some of the younger, more impressionable ones looked up to Gilligan. He would talk to them as if he were their father, defend them when necessary and help them out. They would eat breakfast, lunch and tea in his company and follow him around the exercise yard.
    One of Gilligan’s devotees was Brian Meehan, who was a protégé of Martin Cahill, the gangland criminal known as the General. Cahill had recruited Meehan as a youth and turned him into a highly skilled getaway driver. Meehan had a number of dysfunctional character flaws and no sense of family values. As a boy, he lived with his parents on Stanaway Road in Crumlin, but hung around the run-down, drug-infested Fatima Mansions complex. With 15 convictions under his belt, he was serving time in Portlaoise for his role in an armed raid on the Allied Irish Bank on Grafton Street in central Dublin. He and Paul ‘Hippo’ Ward, a miscreant youth who grew up in Windmill Park in Crumlin, would discuss crime with Gilligan in his cell, sometimes for hours.
    Gilligan never said much, recalled George Royal, one former inmate. ‘They would all be sitting in the cell. Meehan would be the loudmouth, going on about how one fella he knew was making thousands selling drugs. They’d be all looking at each other saying, “How can he be making that much from selling dope?” They would say, “Sure he’s a fucking eejit. If he can do it, so can we. Think how much we could make, with the backup we have.”
    ‘This was all talk with Meehan, but Gilligan would sit there and listen. He never said a word, he just listened, but was taking everything in. Make no doubt about it, that’s where it all started,’ said Royal.

    Not everything about prison life proved positive for Gilligan. Contrary to what he would have everyone believe, he was deeply insecure with regards to his personal life. Fear of losing his wife