Charged with having cocaine worth €2m at Rosslare Europort
A LORRY driver’s wife wept in Wexford Court as her husband was remanded in custody charged with having more than two million euro worth of cocaine in Rosslare.
Forty-one year old Damian Bogusz, with an address at Grange Park in Waterford, was picked up by Customs and Excise in Rosslare Europort on July 30.
Two days later he was brought before the District Court in Belvedere Road where formal evidence of arrest and charge was given by Detective Garda Pat O’Brien.
The defendant followed proceedings with the assistance of a Polish interpreter as the judge was told how he had arrived in Ireland aboard a Stena ferry from France.
A stop and search operation uncovered 46 kilos of drugs over the bunk in the lorry cab.
The seized substance was thought at first to be amphetamines but preliminary testing by Forensic Science Ireland suggested that it was in fact cocaine, with a value of €2.5 million.
Bogusz, who worked for Michael O’Neill in Bagenalstown, had been in Spain delivering a load of beef.
Interviewed, he told the detective he had been approached by a couple in Spain to bring two holdalls, which they said contained books, to Ireland.
He received €200 for this favour according to his version of events and he was due to hand the holdalls over at a roundabout on his return to Ireland.
The investigating detective garda described the seizure of drugs as huge and opposed the granting of bail.
The court learned that the accused had been working for 14 years as a lorry driver and that he intended setting up home in Ireland with his wife Anna who had remained in Poland until recently.
Judge Miriam Walsh observed that Bogusz came across as a benign gentleman but she refused bail, remanding him to Cloverhill in custody for a week.
We bury our dead so that they might face the rising sun. That’s what we do. I suppose we like to think that the early dawn might first share its heat and light on those that have gone before, shortening, somehow their endless night. And it brings a certain comfort, and comfort for any that have experienced loss, can only be a good thing.
We pray for our dead, and we remember our dead. We mark their anniversaries, we remain determined to include them in certain occasions of our lives. We might clink a glass to them at Christmas, or even set an extra place at the table, or simply polish and smile at their photograph. But we remember them. In our own ways and in our own, private or semi-private times. Except, that is, for once a year, when we come together, as a community, as a people, and remember together. The Pattern, or the Patron, take your pick.
Once a year, in August, for an hour on a Sunday afternoon, we are as one. The weeks of preparations, and the countless journeys to the graveyard carrying baskets of flowers build up to this crescendo of prayers and blessings.
Rosaries rebounding from the echoing tannoy system. Voices from four or maybe even five generations of the one family spiralling their responses like little silver threads to the heavens. We are as one. And whether or not we are vocal or silent, all is good. In a bright, colourful display, and with an air and tone of ‘oneness’, we are together. Together with our neighbours, our townsfolk, our people. Together with our living and with our dead. And this is good.
The dawning sun over St Mary’s Cemetery in Enniscorthy, rising in the East, inches closer and closer, day by day, to the centre of Vinegar Hill as we approach the Winter Solstice. Then it cracks over the silhouette of that great hill as it starts to heat the bones of our dead. This too, is good. The Pattern
From early August, past the window, troop the grave cleaners, the headstone polishers and the weed pluckers.
Every manner of weapon is hauled behind: hoe, shears, rake. All the stretching brambles that reach horizontally like beggars arms from the edges of dark green laurel hedges, caught between the light of the sun and the drag of dead down gravity, will be tackled, culled and reduced to a decomposing pile, along with plastic carnations and broken blessed pots, broken but nonetheless, no less blessed. The annual Pattern battle has begun, and weeks will now be spent making presentable the beds of the dead. The Furlongs, the Walshes and the Doyles, the dreamers of dreams and the free spirits, the grandmothers and the baby boys. Talk will be of useless greyhounds and fullbacks, of poor clearances and preferential draws for the inside trap, and when day is done, and the march home begun, we’ll question is it August again and where o where has another year gone?