THE hypnotic groove of Sympathy For The Devil by the Rolling Stones oozed through the speakers at Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre. It was the opening of the new play based on the life of crime boss Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch on Monday night.

The lights flashed on and – to the audience’s great surprise – it was not actor, writer and director Rex Ryan who appeared before them, but Gerry himself, sitting and smiling smugly in a large armchair, ready to speak.

His appearance was greeted with rapturous applause from the 600 or so people inside the theatre. Clearly, the man the Special Criminal Court said was the head of the Hutch organised crime gang who have been at the centre of gangland crime in Ireland for decades has his supporters.

Gerry Hutch being interviewed during the play in Dublin’s Ambassador Theatre

It took a while to digest that I was looking at the gangland figure on stage and not Mr Ryan. The son of the late broadcaster Gerry Ryan insists the production is not a glorification of Hutch.

Mr Ryan’s voice bellowed out over a microphone as he conducted a mock interview with Hutch in a fictional scenario where the gangland figure has just been elected to the Dáil as a TD.

The hard question of ‘how does it feel to be elected as a TD’ allows Hutch to tell the audience of how he was driven into politics by the community in the north inner city.

Hutch said that at the 2024 homecoming for Olympic gold medal boxer Kellie Harrington he was told he should be on the stage alongside her and not the politicians who are rarely seen in the community.

It’s a naked piece of political propaganda dressed up as theatre.

A bearded Hutch walks free in April 2023 after he was acquitted at the Special Criminal Court of the murder of David Byrne

Hutch goes on to say that he ‘wasn’t doing it [politics] for the wages. I was doing it for the community, to wake up the place’.

Last week, I attended a press event to promote the play where the PR handlers were frustrated at questions focusing on politics and not the ‘play’.

Yet, the ‘play’ is being used as a platform for Hutch to talk about what he plans to do in Dáil Éireann.

On Monday night he told the audience that as a TD he would be ‘asking certain questions of ministers’ and telling the community if their responses were ‘porkie pies’.

Asked about what advice he would give to his younger self, he replies ‘wouldn’t get caught’ and wanting to get the ‘best education’ possible.

Hutch leaving the High Court in Dublin in 1999

The ‘play’ details Hutch’s upbringing in the harsh socially deprived environs of Dublin’s north inner city – although he did live for most of his adult life in the affluent suburb of Clontarf, where his son was friends with Mr Ryan.

The show relies on a lazy, repeated device of showing Hutch’s inner conflict juxtaposed with the impact of gangland crime on his family – a near assassination in Spain while he is with his wife and the deaths of numerous family members.

There is noticeably no inner turmoil about any innocent victims of gangland crime.

The audience could be forgiven for thinking that the crimes of the Hutch organised crime gang were victimless.

Crime journalist Veronica Guerin, who was murdered in 1996

The most jarring part of the play features real video footage of the late journalist Veronica Guerin who was murdered in June 1996 by gangland figure Brian Meehan.

The screen shows articles Ms Guerin wrote about Hutch, who indicates that she should have got out of journalism. There’s no remorse shown towards the murdered journalist.

It’s a chilling, macabre scene.

It’s unsurprising given Hutch’s hostility towards the media.

RTÉ’s Paul Reynolds is a recurring villain in Hutch’s life. The crime correspondent dared to ask him at the general election count centre during Hutch’s failed bid for a seat in the Dáil in December 2024 about being in control of the guns used in the Regency Hotel shooting eight years earlier. A frustrated Hutch snarled that Reynolds was a ‘dying wasp’.

‘The Monk’ is fond of the line and uses it often these days when he talks to journalists.

Playwright and actor Rex Ryan with Hutch at a press event to promote Ryan’s play, during which Hutch snapped at journalists

At the press event last week, Hutch became enraged at crime journalist Paul Healy when he repeatedly asked him about his links to criminality.

Hutch said that Paul Reynolds ‘ruined it for everyone’ at the count in December 2024 by asking him about those links and that Mr Healy was doing the same.

He hissed: ‘Certain questions you ask me like Paul Reynolds asked me on behalf of the State… to protect the Government… if you go on I’ll just call you a dying wasp like Paul.’

Hutch at the Dublin count centre in December 2024, amid his failed bid to win a seat in the Dáil 

Mr Ryan’s says the play ‘challenges’ Hutch and does not glorify him. Nonsense. It does not challenge Hutch and has him preening on stage about being elected.

It is a shameless exercise in cheap PR masquerading as a ‘play that only serves to enhance Hutch’s chances in May’s by-election in Dublin Central.

And it’s shameful depiction of the murdered mother, wife and journalist Veronica Guerin amid the glorification of gangland life and death.

The song Sympathy For The Devil is not a celebration of the devil. In it, Mick Jagger points out that humans are to blame for most atrocities in history. Is Rex saying we are to blame for gangland criminality?

The only certainty here is that Rex should bury this wretched project out of respect for Veronica Guerin and the countless communities that have been devastated by gangland drugs and violence.