A truck leaves an illicit cigarette factory in Poland. It travels along hundreds of kilometres of motorway, through Germany, the Czech Republic and Belgium before arriving at the port of Dunkirk in northeast France.
The truck boards a ferry bound for Rosslare Europort in Co Wexford. After a 24-hour journey, it is driven off the vessel, on to Irish soil, and the driver attempts to secure entry into the State. He is unaware that customs officers from the Revenue Commissioners have flagged the truck as being high risk before the ferry has even docked.
The truck is taken from the queue at customs, scanned by the new, fixed X-ray gantry system and millions of cigarettes are found buried beneath a cover load of frozen vegetables.
This is the route typical of tobacco seizures made in Rosslare Harbour.
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The trade of illicit cigarette smuggling is growing in Ireland and a number of major seizures across Irish ports have illustrated that rise. Earlier this month, customs officers found nine million illicit cigarettes in the back of a truck that arrived at Rosslare from Dunkirk. Branded “Richmond King Size”, the smuggled cigarettes are estimated to be worth more than €8 million. If sold on the black market, they would have represented a loss to the exchequer of more than €6.4 million in excise duties and tax.
The Rosslare seizure, combined with seizures in Dublin Port, meant more than 27 million cigarettes, valued at €25.3 million, were seized by Revenue between March 1st and 7th. Last Monday Revenue officers seized about 4.1 million cigarettes, valued at €3.7 million, at Dublin Port. Branded “Richmond King Size and Lambert & Butler Original”, these represented a potential loss to the exchequer of more than €2.9 million.
Maureen Dalton, head of the Revenue’s southeast frontier management branch, said Revenue used a mix of human intelligence, sniffer dogs and software-based risk analytics to identify shipments that could be harbouring illicit goods.
Revenue would not disclose what it factors into its risk profiling in identifying loads, but it is understood that strange travel patterns, inconsistent paperwork and nervous drivers are among the many factors flagged by both humans and software.
There are now three sniffer dogs in Rosslare, up from one before Brexit; eight-year-old Jasper is joined by juniors Daithí and Mollaidh, who work around the clock to crack down on smuggling.
“They are colleagues more than anything else,” one of the dog’s handlers said, as the dog was lying flat on his back getting scratched.
Rosslare is home to the only fixed-vehicle X-ray scanner in the State. It was added as part of a €230 million investment and expansion in reaction to the vastly increased volume of trade passing through the port due to Brexit, as traders have sought to avoid customs and border checks in Britain and opted instead for the shortest direct ferries to continental Europe.
Dalton said larger loads of smuggled cigarettes were typically concealed.
“They’ll always be hidden. They’ll always be covered, sometimes with a cover load,” she said.
Revenue officers in Rosslare have found drugs such as cocaine hidden in fuel tanks and the exhaust systems of vehicles. On one Ireland-bound truck, tobacco was found beneath a cover load of potatoes when it was stopped while boarding a ferry in France.
While instances of black-market tobacco factories being raided in Ireland attract headlines from time to time, Vincent Byrne, global director of anti-illicit trade operations at tobacco company JTI, said very little of the illicit product originated in Ireland; most came through internationally trading.
“Most of the illegal cigarettes that we find in Ireland come from outside of Ireland,” he said.
Typically, illegal tobacco products come from counterfeit factories in eastern Europe that purport to be manufacturers of major brands.
The other source is “illicit white cigarettes”, he said; these are cigarettes legally produced in markets such as the United Arab Emirates, Cambodia and China. Often with generic brand names, they are then smuggled across the world and make up a “huge volume” of the illicit trade.
“On the whole, the illegal tobacco trade is dominated by organised-crime groups. Counterfeiting has become a significant issue in Europe,” said Byrne.
Production of these products is extremely cheap; a pack of counterfeit cigarettes can cost as little as 50 cents to produce – or “a euro at most”.
The counterfeits can then be sold at prices far below their legal counterparts, as the vast majority of the purchase price, up to 80 per cent, comprises duties and taxes.
[ The investigators spying on illegal cigarette sellers in DublinOpens in new window ]
Black market production really ramped up in eastern Europe, notably in Poland, “around 10 years ago, but then the crime groups started spreading out to other European countries”, said Byrne.
In recent years, production has shifted nearer to the main destination markets of Britain and Ireland, which have the highest legal minimum prices and therefore offer the largest opportunities for the trade. Belgium is now among the countries with the highest frequency of factory seizures, Byrne said.
This is backed up by a 2026 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime examining how the flow of illicit cigarettes has changed in the past five years. It found that Poland, which was formerly a “notable transit hub, has transformed into a major illicit manufacturing centre”, but that another major route for this smuggling is through the major shipping hub of Rotterdam.
Two days after the seizure in Rosslare, more than nine million cigarettes were found at Dublin Port in a container that had arrived from the Dutch port. The €8.5 million worth of illicit cigarettes had been claimed to be food, but that tricked neither detector dog Milo nor Revenue’s mobile X-ray scanner
The bulk of this trade is coming from China and from the UAE, which is thought to supply as much as 25 per cent of illicit tobacco globally. Where the cigarettes go from there varies.
Revenue says organised crime gangs are behind the trade and are using the ferry routes to access the British market through Northern Ireland. After Brexit, controls on goods entering Britain from continental Europe have become stricter, making it more challenging to smuggle in illicit tobacco directly.
The solution has been to enter ports in the Republic, drive across the Border into Northern Ireland and from there cross the Irish Sea. Revenue says the State is being used as a “land bridge” to bring illicit products into Britain, although the prevalence of black-market cigarettes in the North is said to be larger than in the Republic.
And the share of the tobacco market held by the black market is growing, experts say.
A report by the Institute of Economic Affairs has found that the decline in the sale of legal cigarettes in the UK has vastly outstripped the decreasing number of smokers, suggesting that smokers are increasingly turning to the illegal trade.
Group chats on Telegram in Russian, seen by The Irish Times, advertise cigarettes purporting to be prominent brands for significantly reduced prices, operating on a delivery model or from retail premises.
In the most recent budget, the price of a packet of 20 cigarettes increased by 50 cents, bringing the price of a pack of 20 cigarettes to almost €19. Concerns were raised at the time that such an increase would encourage the black-market economy for tobacco.
Benny Gilsenan of Retailers against Smuggling – a group set up in 2009 to advocate for policy changes that might suppress the black market in the State – argued that the high price of cigarettes was encouraging the black market instead of reducing their consumption.
The black-market trade in the State is certainly growing. Figures from Revenue indicate that illegal cigarettes now account for more than a quarter of the market, representing an estimated loss to the exchequer of €590 million a year.
The number of seizures by Revenue is on the rise, increasing in frequency by 50 per cent from 2019 to 2024. However, since Brexit, the size of these seizures is ever-increasing. Just 13.4 million cigarettes were caught in 2019, with a value of €8.6 million.
That has risen dramatically; as of 2024, 112.3 million cigarettes were seized, with a value of €95.6 million – almost double the previous year.
The figures for 2025 are less dramatic, but Dalton says that after years of significant hauls, the smugglers often adapt their methods, forcing Revenue to “evolve” to keep up.
