Clear And Present Danger comes to IrelandÕs shores

Date Published: {J}

I have to admit that my knowledge of the Colombian cocaine cartels comes from films like Clear And Present Danger – with Harrison Ford playing CIA agent Jack Ryan battling some spectacularly evil people indeed.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that the cartels might become central to the Irish drugs trade – but that was the extraordinary link posed by RTE Crime Correspondent Paul Reynolds in a riveting lecture to NUI Galway Law Society last week.

He gave a frightening glimpse into the dark world of drugs – a €5 million per day trade in Ireland. And, he said, the gangs have gone truly international – with nine Irish criminal gangs operating on the Continent forming alliances with the Turks, who are the middlemen to supplying heroin to Europe.

“Irish criminals are doing direct deals for cocaine with Colombian cartels,” Reynolds told the audience.

“We should be worried about the amount of drugs coming in. €5million per day is what the market is worth . . . that is some business to go into. There is €5 million to be made in the business every day . . . the amount of money that can be made is staggering.”

He said that 50kilos of heroin bought for €1 million, would mean that a drugs gang would make €10 million. That was a “hell of a return” and explained why they were prepared to fight and kill to retain control, or to oust others.

The result was the type of criminal feuds which were now going on in a number of centres around the country, while the diversity of drugs now on offer – including the so-called ‘businessman’s drug’, cocaine – meant that drugs had infected all areas of society, though the neighbourhoods which had been devastated were usually the deprived ones.

The devastation was not confined to poorer areas, he said. Drugs gangs knew that if they were dealing with people from the business and professional classes, that ‘mummy or daddy would pay-up’, or the gangs would shoot their sons and daughters who were using cocaine and were in debt to the gangs.

Reynolds said in some cases, it was not an exaggeration to say the gangs were better armed than the Gardaí, and guns were often used as a sort of ‘sweetener’ in a drugs deal. The international suppliers frequently just put in a few guns with the shipment, and these were later on the streets – with the current favourite appearing to be the Glock, which could fire 16 single rounds, or bursts.

“I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that criminals are better armed than the Gardaí,” said Reynolds, who added that the paramilitary arsenal had also seeped into the drugs trade.

The use of drugs by hitmen, said Reynolds, meant that you now had gunmen who had no inhibitions, no reservations, who had become dehumanised. The cold-blooded shooting of a number of absolutely innocent people had shown the scale of the aggression and dehumanisation in the modern hitman, who was very often in the teens or twenties and high on drugs.

He warned that drug dealers and hitmen could be a sort of celebrity in the eyes of young people who were uneducated, abused, unemployed and had no future. The gang members were the ones with the flash cars, the girlfriends, the big houses, the drugs, the guns.

There was also the danger of very young kids being recruited as “baby dealers and boy soldiers”. He said one youngster picked up by Gardaí in Limerick was carrying a shotgun which was bigger than himself. Many of the individuals now going into the drugs business were “young . . . going straight in at the top, violent, highly unstable, and more dangerous because they have access to guns”.

The background causes of crime increase were population increase, poverty, poor education, drugs, marginalisation of certain areas of cities and towns, an education system which often meant that youngsters at 12 could not read or write, alcohol abuse – with 80% of all crime being related in some way to alcohol abuse.

He said drugs crime needed a societal response – there must never be a sort of half-acceptance of a level of crime and violence. We had not seen a repeat of the outrage that manifested itself when Veronica Guerin was murdered. Anyone who wanted to see the effects not just on gang members killing each other, but ordinary people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, should look up the website www.innocentvictimsofviolence.ie

On the issue of sentencing, Reynolds said that in his opinion, there seemed to be reluctance on the part of judges to hand down the type of long sentences which the Government had expected when mandatory minimum sentences were being set.

Asked how society might tackle the growth of gangland drugs crime, Reynolds said that we had to have a response by society. We also had to come up with radical solutions – we probably had to start with education, but in a way that would tackle deprivation in communities.

No society should take a resource like its schools and open them at 9 in the morning and close them again at 3 in the afternoon. After school, they might, for instance, be voluntarily manned and used as centres for doing homework, for games, for kids socialising, for keeping them off the streets and out of danger, but with discipline to ensure they had a responsibility as well for their actions.

Society should be really radical and feed those kids, if necessary, in the evening. In many cases, if they were let on to the streets, they were in danger of being out all night, of going home to a home where there was no one, where there was alcohol or drugs abuse, where they might be abused themselves . . . the school could provide a place of safety.

If necessary, they should be able to sleep there on mattresses on the floor and then a group of ‘super cleaners’ should be brought in at seven in the morning to have the place ready to be a school again when 9am came. That was the kind of radical action that was needed in the longer term.