IRELAND'S COCAINE COAST

A Recent Bust In The 'Irish Box' Shows Drug Smugglers Are Ruling Over
The Cork Shore

It is known as the 'Irish box' - 7,500 miles of water and coastline
stretching from the republic's Atlantic seaboard around to Dublin in
the east. Vast expanses of these waters are subject to freak and
often rapid weather changes that, according to the US Drug
Enforcement Administration, make them 'nearly impossible to patrol'
and an ideal launch pad for drug smugglers to penetrate the lucrative
UK market.

Detectives in Ireland and Spain are still questioning three men
following the recovery of hundreds of millions of euros worth of
cocaine off the west Cork coast last Monday - Ireland's largest ever
cocaine bust. The Irish drugs squad and detectives in the UK are
still searching for two other men they believe are connected to the operation.

Poor weather this weekend was preventing divers from searching for
the rest of the drugs believed to be have been dumped off the coast.
Navy divers have been on stand-by to search caves in the Dunlough Bay
area for stray bales of cocaine. Meanwhile, in force eight gales, the
coastline is still being patrolled by gardai and customs officials
for contraband that might have washed ashore.

The Irish navy has managed to crack the memory of navigational
equipment seized from the inflatable craft used by the suspected
smugglers and this should reveal the vessels' routes.

Whatever the outcome, the international criminal gangs behind the
alleged smuggling network will continue to use Ireland as a
distribution centre for cocaine aimed at the British market, despite
the physical risks presented by west Cork's rugged coastline.

Security sources in Dublin this weekend said they believed the
shipment would be only the first in a series of landings off
Ireland's south-west coast during the summer. Last week unseasonably
rough weather caught the traffickers by surprise and they were unable
to handle their inflatable craft, known as 'ribs', in the strong seas
off Mizen Head.

'The criminal gangs believe the Irish coast is hard to patrol,' said
a senior garda official. 'They won't give up just because of one
setback. We estimate that for every shipment that gets caught or is
compromised through bad weather, another nine will get through.'

The British gangs are following the route used by the Irish-born drug
trafficker Brian 'the Milkman' Wright, thus known because he always
delivered. During a lifetime of crime, Wright never paid tax, never
had a bank account or credit card, and had no national insurance
number. Despite being almost illiterate, his drug-dealing empire
brought him a box at Royal Ascot, a private jet, racehorses and a
host of celebrity friends.

Although he is now behind bars after being sentenced to 30 years in a
London court earlier this year, associates of Wright's gang based in
England and in Spain's Costa del Sol are thought to have been behind
last Monday's seizure.

It was Wright who pioneered the landing of huge cocaine shipments off
the south-west of Ireland in the early 1990s, leading to him becoming
one of Europe's top drug smugglers. The 'Milkman's' route was first
used in 1996, when the Sea Mist, a chartered yacht carrying 599kgs of
cocaine, was seized in Cork harbour. Like the aborted plot last week,
the Sea Mist docked to seek shelter after running into severe storms.
That time Wright escaped conviction even though the crew were
subsequently all jailed.

Wright's luck, however, finally ran out last year when the British
authorities followed up an investigation into the seizure of five
tons of cocaine, worth an estimated UKP400m, from a ship off the
Canary Islands in June 2005. Twelve people were arrested and are now
serving lengthy prison sentences. 'The Milkman' fled to Cyprus but
then went back to Spain where he was arrested and finally extradited to the UK.

According to garda sources, Ireland has become the favoured route of
the cocaine smuggling network opened up by Wright. The gang
responsible would know that Irish customs have only one 'cutter'
vessel - a craft suitable for inshore work but not the high seas - to
patrol 7,500 miles of the 'Irish box'.

The vulnerability of Ireland's coastline was first highlighted seven
years ago by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA found
that stretches of coast are 'nearly impossible to patrol'. It
concluded: 'Ireland's isolated coasts are ideal for shielding offload
operations. The country's internal role as a transit point will
accelerate as drug trafficking organisations continue to favour using
the island for continental and British-bound cocaine and hashish shipments.'

The situation around Ireland contrasts with other drug smuggling
routes. Since February 1996, the Royal Navy and UK customs officers
have seized 18.36 tonnes of cocaine with a street value of UKP1.5bn
on other sea routes.

Twelve days ago the UK's largest warship, HMS Ocean, seized cocaine
with a street value of UKP29m from a vessel in the Caribbean. Fifteen
bales of the drug were hauled up from the sea by helicopter after
smugglers threw them into the water. Speaking from the ship's control
deck off the Caribbean coast, captain Russ Harding told The Observer
his crew had been kept busy patrolling the 'air corridor' favoured by
cocaine traffickers between South America and the Caribbean. He said
their task was to monitor light aircraft carrying the drug to either
makeshift runways or towards 'drop points' in the Atlantic where they
would jettison their illicit cargo to be picked up by ships bound for Europe.

While the Irish Naval Service has been strengthened in terms of craft
and sailor numbers in recent years, it remains stretched because it
also protects Ireland's dwindling fishing stocks. Irish opposition
leader Enda Kenny has dubbed the Irish Navy the 'Cinderella service'
of the country's defence forces, saying that at any one time there
are only two ships patrolling the seas around the Republic.

Lieutenant Commander Bill Lauste of the Royal Navy said that the
British gangs behind the new routes are well connected and ruthless.

'It can be dangerous, but if they see a helicopter with a large gun
they tend to come quietly. But the really dangerous people are often
those behind the scene. Obviously these operations are making a few
people pretty angry and we are constantly reviewing our security.'

Much of the intelligence on the cocaine smuggling networks is
orchestrated by a new, highly secretive pan-European Maritime
Analysis Operations Centre (MAOC) in Portugal. British intelligence
officers with experts from Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France and the
Netherlands monitor vessel movements from the coca plantations of
South America to the Caribbean via the 'Irish box'. The challenge to
the MAOC team is daunting. More than 220m sea containers are
transported across the oceans and seas each year, with 90 per cent of
cargos escaping inspection.

The MAOC centre, which will open later this year, is aimed at
protecting the EU's Atlantic borderline from cocaine traffickers. A
source inside Soca, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, said:
'Actionable intelligence is matched to maritime assets to counter the
threat in the most effective way possible. This will increase the
operational capability of the participating countries to stem the
flow of cocaine and improve our common knowledge of the gangs involved.'

The problem for MAOC and other agencies involved in halting the
cocaine tide is the dearth of co-operation between services like the
Royal Navy and its smaller Irish equivalent. Last year the then
Conservative shadow Northern Ireland Secretary David Lidington called
for a new Anglo-Irish naval agreement allowing the two services to
work together on joint patrols and to share intelligence aimed at
shutting down the sea bound cocaine smuggling networks. Last year the
Irish Defence Forces confirmed that there was no formal arrangement
between the two navies. Since then there has been no progress.

For the traffickers the risks of using the 'back door' into Europe
and the UK - the often-treacherous waters - are outweighed by the
rewards. According to the latest United Nations annual global drugs
report, around 2.4 per cent of the UK population admit they have
tried cocaine - four times as many as a decade ago. Cocaine abuse,
the report found, is high among 'educated professionals' in the UK,
Italy and Spain. The well-off, it seems, are the market that Wright's
successors are out to exploit.

Drug smugglers have been using the Irish coastline for nearly 40
years. It was first established by the British marijuana smuggler
turned writer Howard Marks and his Belfast-born sidekick Jim 'the
Fox' McCann. But in terms of ruthlessness and organisation today's
gangs are in a league of their own. A number of the gangsters
involved are believed to be among the UK's 1,600 'most harmful
criminals', according to Soca, Britain's version of the FBI. Such
individuals, many now fantastically wealthy through crime, are
unlikely to give up their empire or shut down the Irish route without
putting up a fight.

. A 22-year-old man has been charged in connection with the seizure
of more than UKP100m worth of cocaine in west Cork. At a special
sitting of Clonakilty district court, Gerard Hagan, from Liverpool,
was charged with possession of cocaine at Dunlough Bay, Mizen Hand, on 2 July.

Hagan was remanded in custody to appear before Dunmanway district
court next Wednesday.