Katie Taylor gets Dublin homecoming but a shadow lingers over Irish boxing

T he lonely passion of Katie Taylor will feel more intense than ever on Saturday night in Dublin. As the most significant female boxer in the world, and the most cherished sporting personality in Ireland, Taylor will fight professionally in her home country for the first time. At 36, as an Olympic champion with a flawless 22-0 pro record, Taylor remains remarkably humble and devoted to boxing. But uncertainty surrounds her homecoming.

Taylor, the undisputed world lightweight champion, has moved up a division to challenge Chantelle Cameron who defends all her belts as the imposing super-lightweight world champion at the 3Arena – less than three miles from the scene of a gangland murder which prevented major boxing promotions in Ireland for the past seven years.

On 5 February 2016 at the Regency Hotel a boxing weigh-in was invaded by four gunmen who killed David Byrne, a member of the Kinahan drug-running gang. The attackers were linked to the Hutch gang and the Irish police, the Garda, believe their intendedtarget was Daniel Kinahan. The murderous feud between the Kinahan and Hutch cartels had been sparked by a different shooting in August 2014.

Jamie Moore, who will be in Cameron’s corner as her chief trainer, was shot twice outside Kinahan’s home near Marbella. It was another case of mistaken identity as the authorities eventually established that the shooters had been aiming to kill Kinahan. A month later, while convalescing at home in Manchester, Moore told me how lucky he had been, as one bullet missed an artery by millimetres, and that Kinahan was “a good bloke” in the sense that he supported boxers.

But it has since been accepted in the Irish courts that the Kinahan Organised Crime Group is “involved in drug