When a routine lifeboat mission stumbled upon a massive cocaine haul, it may have revealed Ireland's place in a smuggling route that stretches halfway across the world. Barry Rocheand Conor Lallyreport
For the volunteer units of the Irish Coast Guard (IRCG), every day can bring surprises, and no one can predict what will happen when members are called to an emergency at sea.
Dermot Sheehan, deputy head of the Goleen unit of the IRCG, was prepared for most eventualities when team members assembled shortly before 8am last Monday morning. The IRCG at Valentia had been alerted by Ann O'Regan, whose husband Michael is deputy area officer of the Goleen Unit, after she had received a call from a local farmer near Mizen Head, reporting that a man had come to their farm looking for help following a boating accident. Details were sketchy, but the man had told the farmer and his elderly mother that he and another man had been fishing in the bay below when their rigid inflatable boat had overturned in rough seas. He said that he feared for the life of his friend, who was missing at sea.
It sounded like yet another potential tragedy in an often-treacherous area of sea, which in November 2000 claimed the lives of four fishermen when their trawler, the St Gervase from Castletownbere, went down on rocks near Mizen.
"From the moment our pagers go off, our main concern is search and rescue," says O'Regan. "It's to locate the position of the incident, assess how many casualties may be involved and proceed as quickly as possible with the rescue mission."
It had been a particularly stormy night, with force six to seven winds whipping over four-metre swells on the sea, which was breaking on the jagged promontories of rock that jut out from the cliffs around Dunlough Bay.
A somewhat flattened U-shaped bay stretching over two miles, north from Mizen Head to Three Castles Head, Dunlough Bay was in centuries past known as a wrecking spot for the O'Mahony clan, who would harvest the proceeds of ships sunk on the rocky coastline. As Dermot Sheehan and his colleagues made their way northwest from Goleen towards the high ground above Dunlough Pier, the strong north-westerly winds tossed the huddled red fuschia bushes.
The storm might have abated but it was still wild.
Sending volunteers along the treacherous clifftops to scan the
sea for the missing man, Sheehan learned around 9.05am that the
casualty had been spotted below steep cliffs. He was wearing a life
jacket,
but was dipping between deep swells.
The Castletownbere lifeboat, the Annette Hutton, under cox Brian O'Driscoll, was already on the scene at this stage, having sped quickly across Bantry Bay and around Sheep's Head to the open sea. Sheehan directed one of his volunteers in a luminous jacket to stand on the cliff above the casualty.
He directed O'Driscoll and his crew towards the area, and the man was quickly recovered, not far from the upturned boat, which was surrounded by floating bales.
"It was a surreal scene," said one source. "This guy was floating in the sea surrounded by all these bales f stuff - he was conscious when he was brought aboard but suffering from severe hypothermia - he looked out at the bales, laid back and just went 'f***, f***, f***, f***'." The rescued casualty - a man in his 40s - told lifeboat members that there had been a third man on the rib and that he had been wearing a life jacket, and the search for him continued until 6pm, when the IRCG stood down after advice from the Garda.
Gardaí had been notified of the emergency at the outset,
but Customs were only alerted once it was realised that this was,
to quote Sheehan, "not a normal callout". The Customs vessel
Surveyor began
to try to recover the bales of suspected cocaine.
Although the Annette Hutton was still at sea, Gardaí and Customs asked O'Driscoll not to recover any of the bales. Instead they asked the Baltimore lifeboat RNLI Hilda Jarrett, under cox Kieran Cotter, to haul them aboard.
This was to ensure there could be no cross-contamination in the event that forensic examination found traces of cocaine on the Annette Hutton. It was just over three hours into the investigation, and gardaí were taking no chances.
LOCALS ON MIZEN Head believe the suspected drug smugglers
enjoyed both the worst and the best of luck - the worst in coming
into Dunlough Bay, and the best in coming in near Carrigeenagour
where
the cliffs are only 50ft high and scree rocks mean they are
not sheer.
"Dunlough Bay can be a devil's cauldron in bad weather," says one local. "It can be deadly - so they were unlucky to come in there. We reckon that they had planned to come back into Dunmanus Bay, which is a lot more sheltered with a lot of quiet piers where no one would spot them.
"But once they were in Dunlough Bay, the first fellow was lucky that he was washed ashore where he was, because he could have been crushed against the cliffs. And the onshore winds kept the second lad pinned in - if he had gone out, he would have been swept past the Mizen and lost."
The bales of cocaine, meanwhile, raise the question of whether Ireland is seen as a low-risk transit country through which drugs can be shipped to the UK and other European markets. It is impossible to say how many, if any, major hauls such as that seen in Cork have been smuggled through Ireland in recent years. However, gardai say that, while there were eight very large seizures in the 1990s off the south and west coasts, there have been no seizures since 1999, when the Posidonia was boarded by the Naval Service in 1999 and cannabis valued at £14 million was found. There are 900 points of landing on Ireland's 4,350km coastline. Coupled with a relatively small naval service, which polices waters within a 320km radius of the Republic, it is easy to see why some international cartels would view Ireland as a soft touch.
While the Garda Air Support Unit boasts two helicopters and one twin-engine aircraft, it has no function in policing Irish waters. The IRGC, despite having a fleet of helicopters and vessels, fills a search-and-rescue function only. Unlike its counterparts in other jurisdictions, it has no policing function.
Revenue's Customs and Excise service has overall responsibility
for policing the flow of drugs into the State, but it has just one
small cutter vessel, which was used to fish the bales of cocaine
from Dunlough
Bay this week. Customs and Excise is entirely dependent on
the Naval Service and Air Corps to carry out patrols.
The Navy's eight vessels are usually deployed on fisheries
protection duties, with five or six of these at sea at any one
time. They are diverted from time to time to look for vessels
suspected of carrying
drugs. "We've one of the biggest territorial waters to patrol
in the EU with the smallest navy," says one informed military
source.
The Air Corps has two aircraft to support the naval vessels in carrying out their patrols. However, Irish waters are so vast that searches for boats carrying drugs must be intelligence-led. This means our patrols are only as good as the information collected by the Garda from sources within the Republic and from the law-enforcement agencies of neighbouring countries.
"Countries are a lot more open now in sharing information
compared to a few years ago, but it's still not a perfect world,"
says one senior Garda source. "Some units mightn't want to share
the information
because they want to make the capture themselves. But you
have to remember that the terrorist attacks on September 11th were
not known about in advance. If you can keep something like that
quiet then you can smuggle a yacht full of drugs." Garda and other
security sources say the EU's new Maritime Analysis and Operation
Centre - Narcotics (MAOC-N) unit will result in a much greater
degree
of international anti-smuggling co-operation between member
states. The seven EU states involved are Ireland, the UK, the
Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Italy.
Michael Colgan of Customs and Excise says all countries will
have staff permanently based at the organisation's headquarters in
Lisbon. He believes Ireland will benefit from being part of a
dedicated
anti-drugs-trafficking organisation, which has Europe's
largest maritime assets at its disposal. "This is something we've
been working on for a while, long before Monday's
developments. This will put co-operation to the next level,"
he says.
The potential effectiveness of this new approach, for the time being, is unknown.
WHAT IS CLEAR is the size of the financial rewards on offer to those who organise multi-million cocaine shipments such as that recovered in the waters off Cork. According to the United Nations, the production of cocaine globally fell by 0.4 per cent last year. At 980 tonnes, however, it was still very substantial. UN data issued last month on wholesale prices of cocaine in Central and South America reveal the drug is available in the cocaine-producing regions of Peru for as little as $823 (€605) per kilogram.
The figures are slightly higher elsewhere in the Andean region, but not much. In Colombian cities, for example, a kilo of the drug can be purchased for $1,762 (€1,300). In the main cities of Bolivia the per-kilogram wholesale price is $1,870 (€1,370). Even in Ecuador, which has the most expensive cocaine in the region, a kilogram of the drug only costs $4,500 (€3,300).
These figures are dwarfed by the markup once the merchandise
reaches the insatiable markets of prosperous western nations. In
Ireland, for example, a kilogram of cocaine is valued by the Garda
and Customs at €70,000. However, shipments that come directly
from the source countries of South and Central America are usually
very high in purity. This means the drug can be significantly
bulked up
with glucose and other inexpensive agents. When the bulking
agents are mixed, using household blenders, a kilogram of pure
cocaine can be bulked up as much as three-fold.
It means a kilogram bought wholesale from Bolivia for €605
is instantly worth €70,000 when it reaches Ireland - and up
to €210,000 when it has been mixed with the various bulking
agents. That's a staggering €347 return for every €1
investment. Traditionally, the smuggling of cocaine into the State
has occurred by a variety of means, some ingenious and others
life-threatening. In recent years, gardaí
believe the most popular method used by Irish gangs has been
to conceal drugs in cars and lorries entering the Republic via car
ferry from UK and other European ports.
However, there have been many cases of smaller quantities - typically up to three kilograms - being found in passenger hand luggage at Dublin airport. There has also been a modest but constant flow of (usually desperate and poor) couriers being detected at airports with cocaine concealed internally, having swallowed scores of plastic pelletloads of the drug.
These usually come from South Africa via Antwerp, Amsterdam or
Zurich, and are selected for questioning after passenger profiling.
Such has been the increasing popularity of this method that Customs
and Excise at Dublin airport have installed a modified lavatory,
which catches the pellets for collection after they have been
passed by a suspect passenger, usually after laxative has been
offered by
Customs officials.
Other, much more substantial shipments of the drug have been found in commercial air and sea freight.
BUT IT IS the monster shipments, such as the one seen here this
week, that understandably grab the headlines. When they go wrong,
the loss of investment and potential profit is a major blow to even
the
biggest cartels. But when things run smoothly, as they often
do, the rewards are massive.
The 1,500kg seizure found in Ireland this week could have been
bought for as little as €1 million in Peru. Yet on the
streets, after bulking, it could fetch up to €320 million.
These shipments almost always begin
in Central and South America. Some gangs are so well
organised that they transport large bales of cocaine on small
aircraft from their production laboratories to areas closer to
shipping exit ports.
These planes often take off from secluded, illegal airstrips,
dropping the bales from the skies at their destination point, in a
manner similar to the delivery of humanitarian aid. (This method
was used so frequently by Colombian gangs using Brazil as a staging
country that in 2004 the Brazilian government
introduced legislation allowing its military to shoot down
any suspect aircraft that failed to land when instructed.) Those
shipments that make it through the first stage of the journey are
usually taken by road to harbours and ports where the tricky
international route begins. Typically, shipments - sometimes up
to 50 tonnes - leave these countries as commercial freight
onboard large ships or packed into privately-owned pleasure craft.
Commercial liners have the advantage of being able to carry very
large quantities.
However, they are obliged by international law to be fitted with
global positioning equipment so that their routes can be easily
tracked. Another weakness is that the drugs will at some point need
to be loaded on to smaller boats for landing at shallow local
harbours in European destination countries.
If the drugs are packed into a privatelyowned catamaran they
can be sailed all the way from a country of origin in South America
to the coast of Cork or Kerry, without the need to unload until
their destination has been reached. These pleasure craft are
not required to carry any tracking technology, meaning they are
invisible to radar.
Once the destination has been reached, the boats might dump
their cargo in the water close to the coast for collection by
arrangement with couriers on the mainland. Alternatively, the
delivery or "mother"
vessel will dock at a small harbour and unload. The mother
vessel allegedly used in the shipment of the haul to Cork this week
was a US-registered catamaran called, ironically, The Lucky Day. It
was under arrest in northern Spain last night along with two
Lithuanian crew members.
The four men arrested in Cork this week are still in Garda custody, no doubt cursing the cruel Irish weather that dumped two of them at sea and into the arms of the law.