How Heroin Got into Ireland's Bloodstream
It was once seen as a scourge of working-class Dublin. Now heroin use is on the rise throughout Ireland. As the government move to ban head-shops leads to fears of an increase in illicit drug use, Hot Press presents an in-depth investigation into the country’s growing smack habit – and asks, what can be done before a crisis becomes an epidemic?
Stuart Clark, 15 Jun 2010
There was much celebrating in Garda circles last week when convicted heroin dealer Christy Kinahan had his collar felt again in the Spanish resort town of Estepona where he’d been living since 2003 in a €6 million villa. His was one of a series of 34 arrests, which took place in Spain, Brazil, Belgium, England and Ireland under the auspices of Operation Shovel.
“Today’s arrests will have dealt a major blow to an organised criminal business suspected of supplying drugs and gangs in cities across Europe,” said the Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcab shortly afterwards. “This is a mafia family fairly well-known in the United Kingdom and Ireland. In Spain not so much, but they were hiding out on the Costa del Sol and this has been a long drawn-out operation that has taken more than a year of investigations and of working with Europol and the police of the three countries. We also believe this network has been offering a global investment service, ploughing hundreds of millions of pounds of dirty cash into offshore accounts, companies, and property on behalf of criminals.”
The Spanish legal system being notoriously slow in its machinations, Kinahan can now look forward to at least two years on remand before his case is heard. That’s some people’s idea of justice...
The Operation Shovel arrests came just a week after the Criminal Assets Bureau here had relieved another convicted heroin dealer, Tony Felloni, the man the tabloids tastefully dubbed King Scum, of €500,000 of his ill-gotten gains.
“We’d been feeling a bit toothless,” a National Drug Squad source tells Hot Press, “but Christy Kinahan being arrested and CAB concluding their case against Tony Felloni shows that these fuckers can’t get away with it. When it started in 1999 the whole Europol thing was a bit clunky, but now that it’s working properly it’s providing a constant flow of intelligence, which is what made Operation Shovel possible.”
Within 24 hours of Kinahan and his men being rounded up, heroin users in Dublin reported a citywide shortage of the drug. As their desperation rose, so did the price of black market methadone, which doubled to €50 for 40 ml. The cause of this, Hot Press has learned, wasn’t a disruption to supplies but dealers deciding to keep a low profile in case the Gardai tried to mount a spectacular of their own.
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