Unwrapping the contraband

Machetes, bush meat and the occasional live animal - the Customs officers with An Post seize some strange packages. Fiona McCannjoined them on a typical day

Fiona, Denise and Pat have set the machetes aside; the stun guns are shelved and the Chinese vitamin pills have been shunted to make room. Something else has caught their attention and has them busy unwrapping, in what looks like an elaborate game of Pass the Parcel. A bulky package is carefully unwrapped, paper shed like magnified confetti. As the parcel comes apart, it begins to look like there's nothing there after all, but Pat's not convinced, and his persistence pays off. Hidden in one of the many folds, he finds a diamond ring. It looks like there's good news on the way for some unknown recipient.

In this case, however, it'll come with bad news too, given that Denise and Pat are Customs officers and diamond rings are subject to import duties that must be paid, regardless of the occasion.

"We won't ruin anyone's surprise," says Denise. "We only write to whoever's address is on the parcel. But it's not good news that we're writing to them - we are there to collect."

Diamonds may be a rarity among the hundreds of thousands of parcels that go through Portlaoise Mail Centre every year, but Customs officers are alert to everything at this postal hub - a large, buzzing warehouse employing more than 300 people who process and sort through 35,000 postal items per hour. It is the first port of call for all international mail arriving in Ireland.

"The stuff we're interested in comes through airports from all around the world and is brought down here two or three times a day," explains Richard Keely, who heads up the team of 11 officers at Portlaoise. Huge trucks arrive to disgorge their foreign-born contents onto the conveyer belt, but not before Toby - or one of his wet-nosed canine cohorts - has leapt on board to weed out the contraband.

Once Toby has put his olfactory skills to work in search of drugs, it's up to the officer to sniff out whatever his more hirsute colleague is not trained to locate. As parcels of all dimensions and contours trundle by on the conveyor belt - some 60,000 in October alone, and up to half a million a year - Keely and his Customs colleagues pick out any packages they deem suspicious and place them in wire cages to be wheeled away for further examination.

"The X-ray machine, an external examination of the parcel and the country profile would determine what we open," he explains as the conveyer belt whirs under his watchful eye.

"The size and shape and weight and feel of the parcel will indicate certain things. With experience you'd have a fair idea when you lift a parcel."

With packages coming in from all manner of far-flung locations, the place of provenance can also be an indicator of content. "Some of the Eastern European countries send a lot of cigarettes, some of the African countries send meat, South America sends drugs, China is a source country for counterfeit goods," lists Keely.

IRISH PEOPLE WHO have lived abroad are no doubt familiar with the homesickness that's cured only by the arrival of a timely box containing the lifelines of Tayto and red lemonade, so with this country's changing demographic, it's little wonder that immigrants missing home produce will be looking for similar packages. This is complicated slightly when such items include the likes of antelope, snake or other bush meat, which won't get past the keen noses of Customs.

"They send some bush meat, but it's had for us to differentiate one type of meat from another," says Keely, adding that working out which parcels contain meat is not a difficult task. "You can smell it, usually - not necessarily because it's gone off, but sometimes because it's smoked . . . Some meat you smell because it is going off - sometimes you get maggots coming out of it."

After several years on the job, Keely has also developed a certain expertise with chemical substances. "We're getting a lot of diazepam," he explains. "It's a Valium-type drug. They're little blue pills that come mainly from Pakistan, India, the Far East." Cannabis is also common, but instantly sniffed out with the help of Toby, while the area of medicine importation has become a growing concern, with the increased availability of drugs online leading to self-diagnosis and self-medication.

"It goes back to internet purchasing - medicines may be licensed for use in America or Asia, but not licensed for use in the EU," says Keely. He's noticed an increase in one particular type of pill - that used to treat male erectile dysfunction.

"There seems to be an upsurge in Viagra-type tablets - there's quite a lot of that coming around lately. Maybe Irish women are worried!" he jokes.

Wandering past iron cages containing unopened packages that have been specially selected for examination generates a certain excitement - it's the element of mystery about the contents, added to the colourful stamps, the varied handwriting and the personal nature of an exchange that travels through so many pairs of hands, its secret intact until the recipient unwraps it. Except when it comes to the parcels that Keely and his team will have opened and either resealed and sent on, stamped with duty owed, or diverted to a state warehouse to be destroyed.

All this unravelling takes place in an area separate to the workings of the rest of the postal centre, where the filing and sorting of all that has been approved for delivery is conducted in a more automated environment.

Behind the wire cages are a collection of surfaces for parcel-opening purposes, one bearing an open box of machetes. Beside them is a larger box of crossbows. This is the danger table, clearly, but Keely and co take it in their stride.

"We get a lot of offensive weapons - knives, knuckle-dusters, crossbows," he says with the kind of nonchalance that suggests he's seen it all. He points to a box of stun guns - small, battery-operated gadgets that look innocuously like phone chargers or oversized cigarette lighters.

"They can disable you for a few minutes," Keely explains. "Unless you've got a dodgy heart, when they can disable you permanently."

The Customs officers clearly have plenty to occupy them as it is, but in the run-up to Christmas, the volume of parcels going through Portlaoise Mail Centre is only set to increase. With this in mind, Keely warns that those sending gifts to loved ones from across the waters should be aware that even the most thoughtful present could be liable for import duties.

SPARE A THOUGHT, in such a case, for those at the other end being greeted by a postman with a bill. "People are not going to be very happy when they're sent a present from their relatives in the US and they're charged on it," Keely points out, as we browse through boxes of Dolce & Gabbana runners, football jerseys, Chanel wallets, and Juicy Couture tracksuits, all suspected counterfeits that will probably be seized and destroyed. Someone slaps down half a dozen cartons of cigarettes with foreign packaging - 3,200 cigarettes, which arrived in a package from Poland.

It's like Christmas every day in Portlaoise, with a plethora of parcels to be opened daily, and while Keely and his team of Customs officers may not necessarily see it that way, he admits it's rarely dull. While he has yet to find body parts in a package, he has come across people's ashes in parcels being sent through the post, not to mention the occasional live animal.

"We had live terrapins once," he recalls, almost matter-of-factly. "Two of them in a fruit box with some wet tissue, sent from Florida. They'd been in a sack, thrown onto a plane and they came out of it alive." He pauses. "They were shook up, I'd say."

Tens of thousands of parcels and packages are shook up, squeezed, sniffed and scanned as they funnel into the country. And, as the stream of packages flows on, what's been filtered - terrapins, Oriental medicines, firearms and designer rip-offs - is diverted to its new destination, be it Dublin zoo or dump, but rarely, if ever, returned to sender.

What you can - and can't - send through the post

•If you don't want to pay Customs Duty and VAT, parcels from outside the EU can be declared as gifts, but the value of the contents must not exceed €45

•No more than 50 cigarettes, 1 litre of spirits or 2 litres of wine can be received as gifts.

•All parcels opened by Revenue officers that contain undeclared excisable products (ie cigarettes, tobacco, cigars, alcohol) are seized.

•Any parcels found containing firearms or offensive weapons are checked for import licenses, and if none are produced, are seized.

•Parcels containing drugs, pornography or counterfeit goods will be seized.

•Parcels coming from outside the EU containing meat will be seized.

•Parcels containing live terrapins will be seized.