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courtesy of The Guardian
Navies Urged To Tackle New Drugs Threat
Sunday, February 05, 2006
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 €14; a gram of cocaine can be priced at as little as €40, 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.
Previous Page
This News Item
courtesy of The Guardian
Navies Urged To Tackle New Drugs Threat
Sunday, February 05, 2006
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 €14; a gram of cocaine can be priced at as little as €40, 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.
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