Think Dublin Narcos show is a stretch? In fact, it barely scratches the surface
ON OUR WAR WITH THE CRIME CARTELS
THERE’S a new TV documentary series starting on Sky Crime at the beginning of next month called Dublin Narcos. It’s a catchy title, although what immediately springs to mind is the hugely successful drama series from a few years back, simply called Narcos, which chronicled the life of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Head of the Medellín Cartel, he became the richest criminal in history, worth a cool $30billion by the time he was shot dead by Colombian special forces in 1993. Dubbed The King of Cocaine, he cultivated a reputation as being a friend to the poor, a Robin Hoodtype crook. More than 25,000 people went to his funeral.
With his vast wealth, audacious drug deals and political ambitions, his chaotic life lent itself beautifully to a three-series television drama.
Quite how thrilling this new Dublin-based docuseries will be remains to be seen. Liverpool Narcos came out a couple of years ago and it won a Bafta for photography, so at least we’ll know this new show will be beautifully shot – capturing our capital city in all its grimy and gritty glory.
But initially it did all sound like a bit of stretch.
Pumping a presumably fairly decent-sized budget into a shiny new series all about the drugs scene in Dublin? Surely there are other cities that would be a more obvious choice to cover.
But then, lo and behold, on Tuesday it emerged that gardaí had discovered over €2million of alleged cocaine in a garage in Dublin. With all the headlines last year about the Kinahan cartel being pulled apart after kingpin Daniel Kinahan was put on America’s ‘narco-terrorists’ list, and after the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on the gang boss as well as his dad Christy, brother Christy Jr and four of their key associates, you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe a major breakthrough had been made in the crackdown on big-time dealers in this country.
And certainly, life can’t be as rosy as it once was for any of the Kinahans, who have been reported as currently ‘laying low’ in Dubai, unable to move around as freely as they once did. But it would seem that the business of distributing and selling drugs in Ireland is still booming, prompting yet another discussion in the Dáil this week about so-called recreational or weekend drug use.
‘There’s another type of drug use we’ve got to start talking about in this country,’ said interim Justice Minister Simon Harris. ‘What I’m talking about is the increasing prevalence and often visibility of drug-taking as part of a night out in Ireland.
‘Any conversation we have about drug use cannot ignore this reality. There is a direct link between snorting a line or taking a pill and murder, assault, criminality and misery.
‘Drug use on a Friday or Saturday night is funding and supporting violence, crime, murders the next week. You’re helping to line the pockets of criminals who are inflicting misery and pain in communities across our country.
‘We need to get real about this – drug use is not victimless, it’s far from it.’
He added: ‘We’ve got to start calling this out – there’s a direct link and a direct correlation between that so-called social activity and lining the pockets of these criminal gangs.’ He’s right of course. Last week I worked on an article about drug dealing at the Oliver Bond flat complex in inner-city Dublin. On a couple of afternoons I watched as young kids on bikes kept sketch for gardaí as very sick-looking individuals shuffled their way in to openly get their fix. All the while, normal life for the vast majority of the residents went on around it.
Except their lives are far from normal. I spoke to several who told me how they constantly live in fear of confrontation with the dealers, and how their tiny kids have to step over addicts passed out on the stairwells.
It’s not just Oliver Bond. A friend told me recently how their dad’s elderly neighbour in Ballymun earns a few quid from local dealers by keeping an eye out for gardaí. He probably reckons he might as well join in.
It’s rife right across the city. And of course, it’s not only Dublin. But perhaps the subject of an ‘Irish Narcos’ TV series would have been too broad and unwieldy to cover. Perhaps there’s a Cork or Limerick Narcos in the pipeline. Or even taking just one town or village anywhere in the country could work.
As it is, Dublin Narcos will cover the heroin-scourged Eighties, the explosion of ecstasy in the Nineties and the rise of cocaine use during the Celtic Tiger years and beyond.
One thing is for sure: if a big TV network such as Sky thinks we’re worthy of a three-part series, maybe we have an even bigger problem than we think.
The business of distributing and selling drugs is booming