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to learn. He was an average child who interacted well with his fellow classmates and teachers and avoided trouble. Driven perhaps by the sheer turmoil of home life, Gilligan liked the time he spent in Mary Queen of Angels, where he received a good all-round education in maths, English and Irish. Daily life in Mary Queen of Angels was good for Gilligan.
    Barrack Yard Drill (BYD) was one part of his education to which he applied himself with zeal. BYD was run by Mick O’Neill, a retired soldier who used to visit the school every week and put the children through their paces in the school playground, lining the students up and instructing them in a military-like way to touch their toes, stretch and stand to attention. O’Neill had a great rapport with the young Gilligan and his classmates, who rewarded him by throwing pennies into his hat.
    Mary Queen of Angels gave Gilligan confidence. It was a place where he could develop as a child, while at home he was given jobs and subjected to violence. In school he could do as the other children did, play marbles in the spring, relivio in the summer and conkers in the autumn when the chestnuts would fall. Friends of his from that time say he excelled at spinning tops, a game where the children pitched coins at a wall and whosever landed the closest got the money. Gilligan’s interest in gambling commenced early on in his life.
    The young Gilligans went without comics and luxury items like toys because of their father’s fondness for alcohol; all they could do was dream about action men and toy soldiers while music was something they occasionally heard on the radio. Television was a novelty sometimes seen in the homes of privileged neighbours.
    By the time Gilligan was 12 years old his father had become a burglar who was well known to members of An Garda Síochána; but it was in the north inner city that Johnno was most notorious. There he recruited youngsters slightly older than his own children to steal from local shops.
    ‘Old Johnno had this knack of hitting his backside off the door to break the lock,’ remembered Maurice Ward, one youth from his gang. ‘He was such a small man that we used to wonder how he did it. He would rob anything, sweets, money, anything. A big thing with him was Gillette razor blades. He would sell them around the docks.’
    In life, Johnno’s brothers had fared much better than he had. His brother Thomas had joined the British Army, while Frank had become an important figure in the Seaman’s Union of Ireland, a position he used to secure Johnno menial work on the Britain & Irish Line. Sarah Gilligan did not want her sons turning out like their father, so when John Gilligan left Mary Queen of Angels without any qualifications at 14 years of age, she sent him to Uncle Frank who got him a job with the B&I Line.
    Frank was fond of his nephew and started him off working as a cabin boy in the hope that he would join the merchant navy and get a decent career. For a time, he worked on the ferries that crossed between Holyhead and Liverpool; he is remembered as being a ‘good little worker who gave no cheek’.
    Gilligan kept in touch with the staff of Mary Queen of Angels and often returned to the school to look for advice and to say hello. For this, he is still remembered.
    A year after he left school, John Gilligan had his first brush with the law. He was not yet 15 when he appeared in Rathfarnham District Court on 3 March 1967 charged with larceny. He was given probation and warned not to get into trouble again by the judge.
    But Gilligan was destined for a life of crime. He also lived in the shadow of his father’s reputation; nothing seemed to work for him. No matter how hard he tried, he could not shake off his father’s reputation for being a drunkard, although he himself rarely consumed alcohol. He spent the next few years at sea moving between various jobs on ferries and merchant ships that travelled between Ireland and England.
    He later joined