NAVIES URGED TO TACKLE NEW DRUGS THREAT

An Anglo-Irish naval task force should be deployed to combat a new
drug-smuggling scheme that uses satellite technology, opposition
parties have demanded.

Irish criminals living abroad are sending cargo ships to drop off huge
watertight containers of heroin and cocaine in the Irish Sea. The drug
barons then pinpoint the location of the dumped cargo in shallow
waters off the east cost with Global Positioning Systems technology.

These GPS co-ordinates are transmitted to couriers in Ireland who set
off on fishing vessels and speedboats to pick up the containers, which
are then taken to rural coastal areas.

Senior Garda sources say the scheme, pioneered by American drug
smugglers off the US's southern coastal states, avoids bringing huge
quantities of heroin and cocaine through Dublin Port and other dry
docks where security is tighter.

Irish and British opposition parties are calling for increased naval
co-operation between the two countries to counter this latest criminal
innovation.

The Tory Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary David Liddington said: 'I
hope that the two governments will consider joint action by the
British and Irish Naval forces to help police tackle this menace. A
joint force is the only way to patrol an increasingly vulnerable Irish
Sea.' The Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny described the Irish Naval
Service as the 'Cinderella service' within the Defence Forces, which
he said needed more resources to cope with the drug smuggling network
through the Irish Sea.

'At any one time we have only two ships actively patrolling Irish
territorial waters and they have to try and track and prevent the ever
increasing movements of drug smugglers off our coastline. More needs
to be done to stop this flow of drugs becoming a torrent,' Kenny said.

According to senior Garda officers the route for cocaine in Ireland
begins in South America. The drugs are then shipped to Galicia in
northern Spain and ferried to points in the Irish Sea where containers
are dumped in the shallower Irish coastal waters. The detectives say
that this is one of the central reasons why cocaine and heroin are
more widely available and cheaper than they used to be.

In Greater Dublin a bag of heroin - enough to satisfy the addiction of
an average user for a day - costs UKP14; a gram of cocaine can be priced
at as little as UKP40, although the drug is usually heavily adulterated
with glucose and household products such as washing powder.

A spokesman for the Defence Forces confirmed that currently no formal
co-operation exists between the Irish Naval Service and the Royal Navy.