A SENIOR officer with the Irish Coast Guard in west Cork told the trial of three Englishman charged in connection with a €440 million drugs seizure that he believed it was a drugs drop gone wrong before he saw any bales in the sea.
Deputy area officer with Goleen unit Dermot Sheehan said he became suspicious after speaking to a young man who had called to the home of farmer Michael O’Donovan at Carrigeengour, Goleen, and said he had come from the sea.
Mr Sheehan said he asked the man, who introduced himself as a Gerard O’Leary from Co Monaghan, what happened and he said he had been on a fishing trip with two friends, Gary and James, when their boat sank.
When he went outside to talk to his colleague John O’Connor, Mr Sheehan said that something didn’t add up.
Mr Sheehan and Mr O’Connor then drove towards Dunlough Bay and saw a green Landrover with an English registration. He noted down the number in a logbook. He and Mr O’Connor saw two men coming across the fields from the cliffs; they kept looking out to sea.
One of them said that “there’s a guy down there in the water with a life jacket on and he needs saving now,” said Mr Sheehan, adding the man had an English accent.
Mr Sheehan drove to a spot where he could get a mobile phone signal but he noticed in his wing mirrors as he left the scene that the two men crossed the road, went into another field and continued walking away from where they said the man was in difficulty.
He rang a colleague in the Goleen Coast Guard unit, Garda John Dowling, and told him to alert gardai. “I told him I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a drugs drop gone wrong,” Mr Sheehan said.
Coxswain of Baltimore Lifeboat Kieran Cotter told the trial how they were initially asked to assist with a search and rescue but later they recovered some 55 bales from Dunlough Bay which they handed over to Paddy O’Sullivan of Customs Anti-Smuggling Unit.
Three Englishmen, Martin Wanden (45), no fixed abode, Joe Daly (41), Carrisbrooke Avenue, Bexley, Kent and Perry Wharrie (48), Pyrles Lane, Loughton, Essex deny possessing cocaine for sale or supply at Dunlough Bay, Mizen Head on July 2nd, 2007.