Garda dressed as postman to deliver drugs worth €280k

A GARDA dressed up as a postman and borrowed an An Post van to deliver 36,000 ecstasy pills to a suspected dealer, a court has heard.

Philip Noonan, 49, signed for the parcel and was promptly arrested by gardaí who had been alerted by Customs to a suspicious package, later found to contain over €280,000 worth of drugs.

Noonan, of Viking Road, Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, was sentenced to twoand-a-half years in prison for possessing drugs for sale or supply at his home on June 30, 2015.

He initially told gardaí he hadn’t been expecting a delivery and knew nothing about the package, but pleaded guilty on the day of his scheduled trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. The court heard the pills had a market value of €288,000.

Passing sentence yesterday, Judge Martin Nolan accepted that the accused man was not the owner of the drugs but had decided to receive the package for onward delivery.

‘He knew what he was getting into,’ said the judge.

When Customs were alerted about the suspicious package in early June, 2015, it was then arranged with postal services that a garda wearing an An Post jacket would deliver the package to the accused man.

Noonan opened the door and signed for the package, which gardaí found comprised of MDMA.

He has 20 previous convictions, mostly for minor public order offences and criminal damage, apart from one robbery for which he received a two-and-a-half-year sentence in 1992.

James Dwyer BL said his client was a chronic alcoholic.

He was ‘an important cog in the machine of drug-trafficking, but he wasn’t the man who was the owner of the drugs’, said Mr Dwyer, before asking the judge if there was any public interest in his client being incarcerated. Judge Nolan replied that although there were mitigating circumstances, he deserved a custodial sentence.