The harrowing reality of cut-price 'flash deal' cocaine: Step-by-sobering-step, the Daily Mail exposes the routes, corruption and innocent victims behind Britain's drugs market

Published: 02:50, 19 August 2026 | Updated: 02:50, 19 August 2026 At 1.32pm on Tuesday September 26, 2023, soldiers from the elite Army Ranger Wing of the Irish Defence Force prepared to board a rogue bulk carrier in the Atlantic Ocean. The Navy had been tracking the Panama-flagged MV Matthew freighter for three days as it made suspiciously slow progress through the Celtic Sea, even at one point dropping anchor in the busy shipping lane for 12 hours off the coast of Waterford. Authorities suspected the 190-metre-long ship, which had set sail from the Caribbean island of Curacao, may be attempting to drop a payload of drugs near the shore to be collected by smaller vessels and brought into Ireland. When the MV Matthew ignored a radio command to turn slowly for Cork port, suspicions grew. When the carrier ignored two warning shots from an Irish warship and pushed at full-speed for international waters, they were all but confirmed. Army Rangers boarded the carrier in high winds, fast roping down from a helicopter and detaining the 25-man crew. What they eventually found did not disappoint. It was the largest drugs haul in Irish history: 2.25 tons of cocaine worth an estimated €157million (£133.5million). Eight men - including from Iran, Ukraine and the Philippines - were duly sentenced to a combined 129 years in prison. One month ago, a full three years on from the seizure, and the MV Matthew finally left Cork port where it had languished first as evidence and later awaiting sale, costing the Irish taxpayer €17million (£14.5million) in management and maintenance fees. There's no doubt that the story of the MV Matthew marks a major victory in Ireland's fight against drug smuggling. But the terrifying truth - as the Daily Mail learnt this week - is that the 2.25 ton haul was, more than anything else, a sobering reminder of the scale of a problem that spiralled out of control a long time ago. Ireland is awash with drugs, particularly cocaine. No longer the titillating preserve of the monied-classes, white powder has become a national obsession on the Emerald Isle. And most alarming of all, from Ireland cocaine can be freely smuggled into the UK. 'The general consensus here is that only a fraction of what is getting smuggled in is getting caught,' confessed the late Cork County Council councillor Joe Carroll in 2024, shortly after the MV Matthew seizure. The MV Matthew, which was seized in Ireland while carrying a record cocaine haul A partially burned cocaine stash in a lifeboat on the vessel, which remained docked for years 'Our coastline is wide open,' added fellow councillor Danny Collins in the same year. 'The fact that we don't seem to have enough money to run our navy is not great. It is easy to bring the drugs into West Cork. The fact that drugs are so prevalent now in Irish society points to one thing: a good supply of it.' Indeed, according to a United Nations report, Ireland ranks as the fourth biggest consumer of cocaine per capita in the world, not least because it is so readily available. The Irish Health Research Board announced earlier this summer that cocaine use required more medical treatment in 2025 than any other drug barring alcohol, accounting for 42 per cent of cases. The number of people in Ireland now receiving treatment for cocaine has risen by 336 per cent since 2017. 'It's everywhere,' said a barman in County Cork, who didn't wish to be named. 'People are drinking less and snorting more. They call it 'nose beers'. You can try and keep it off your premises but that's just driving customers away. And few can afford that.' This week, the Daily Mail travelled hundreds of miles along the starkly exposed south coast of Ireland to get to the genesis of Ireland's cocaine problem and find out just how easy it is for sophisticated criminal gangs to smuggle the drug into the country, and duly on to the United Kingdom via the open land border into Northern Ireland. Traditionally, drugs have been smuggled into Ireland via major ports and airports using a combination of concealment and corruption. As former customs officer David O'Sullivan put it to the Daily Mail this week: 'these were the days of 'stuffers and swallowers'.' But as port authorities began to roll-out high tech X-ray machines, so too the smugglers developed elaborate workarounds. One extraordinary case from Ireland in 2021 saw cocaine mixed into the chemical compound of charcoal to be later separated in a laboratory. A similar incident saw cocaine mixed with coffee granules. But such techniques were costly and are now increasingly rare. Instead, a far more straightforward method has come to the fore, in which drugs are stowed on a large 'mothership' before being dropped, sealed in black polythene bales, in the middle of the sea fastened to a GPS tracker. The drugs are then collected by small, high-speed 'daughter ships' and brought ashore via secluded coves or deserted beaches. Police and naval personnel handle 1.8 tons of pure cocaine from the yacht Dances With Waves The navy had to storm the 18-metre-long boat off Ireland's exposed southwest coastline In this regard, Irish authorities are a prisoner to the country's geography, with its more than 2,500 km of exposed Atlantic coastline providing ideal landfall for South American boats. Once ashore, the narcotics are loaded into inconspicuous vehicles, such as camper vans, and taken on either to be sold in Ireland or more often smuggled north into the UK where the price per gram can be 50 per cent higher at up to £100. Indeed, in June last year, then Home Office minister Dame Diana Johnson admitted to Parliament: 'The National Crime Agency's latest National Strategic Assessment notes the Common Travel Area, and particularly the routes between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain, continue to be exploited by criminals for the purposes of serious and organised crime including the smuggling of illicit commodities.' Put simply, this is easier, cheaper and far less risky than smuggling class through a port authority. The scale of the problem first emerged in 1998 when Irish customs officials found 325kg of cocaine stored in a catamaran in Kinsale Harbour, one of the most affluent towns in Ireland. In 2007, 62 bales of cocaine were recovered from Dunlough Bay - weighing over a ton - after the small boat used to bring them ashore ran out of fuel and eventually capsized. The following year, 1.8 tons of 80 per cent pure cocaine was found after the Irish Navy stormed the 18-metre-long Dances With Waves yacht off the southwest coast. In 2023, the case of the MV Matthew proved things were only getting worse. The best known gang conducting such operations in Ireland is the notorious Kinahan Organised Crime Group, which has long been identified as a leading player in the trade by everyone from Europol to the US Treasury. However, the Kinahans' influence has dwindled somewhat in recent years, while the arrest of leader Daniel Kinahan in Dubai in April this year has hamstrung them further. Subsequently, others have filled the vacuum, including 'The Family' - a notorious Dublin-based gang described by head of the Garda Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, Detective Chief Superintendent Seamus Boland, as 'the primary organised crime gang that's impacting in this jurisdiction in relation to cocaine and heroin trafficking'. Earlier this week, the Daily Mail travelled to the seaside village of Courtmacsherry, 30 miles southwest from Cork City, and where last July €31million of cocaine was seized being smuggled in from nearby Broadstrand Beach. The Daily Mail's Fred Kelly in Kinsale, County Cork Courtmacsherry village in West Cork. Some €31million of cocaine was seized there last July 'I know the coast fairly well,' begins Courtmacsherry's local RNLI coxswain Ken Cashman, with more than a hint of modesty. The 54-year-old former fisherman - who still drops lobster pots in his spare time - has volunteered with the RNLI for 15 years, serving as coxswain for the past two. 'I would say it's near impossible to police the coastline. Because it's huge, with lots of shelter. If you take off from Mizen Head in the east, there might be 200 places you could find harbour for a boat within maybe 30 miles. And some of these places even local people wouldn't know about.' As Cashman makes plain, one of the biggest problems is that the small boats used off the coast of Ireland to bring drugs ashore do not need to be registered. 'Fishing boats are fairly well regulated now, but there's nothing for pleasure boats up to 24 metres and 1000 horsepower. So anyone can buy a boat and drive on, which is madness,' he argues. Boats involved in such activities are easy to spot for a seasoned seaman like Ken.  'In our line of work, we've come across stuff that's been very suspicious. Like you might see a sailing boat in the water doing nothing 40 miles offshore,' he explained. 'Or you might see a camper van parked in a cove somewhere for weeks at a time. What are they doing there?' The individuals involved are easy to spot, too.  'There's people we're suspicious of,' Ken continued. 'Like there was a chap here years ago who kind of came in on a sailing boat and kind of lived here for a while. And then all of a sudden had loads of money and was buying ranches and farms. He might be totally innocent… but you do wonder sometimes.' But if the boats - and some of the individuals - are so easy to identify, why are the authorities so far behind? Just this week, a serving Irish Naval officer - who wished to remain anonymous - admitted that they are only able to catch 'maybe 10 per cent' of the cocaine shipped into Europe via Ireland. At the same time, the former chief of staff of Ireland's Defence Forces, Mark Mellett, confessed that his country is 'not in a position to stop these flows' of narcotics. The reason lies in the decade-long underfunding of the beleaguered Irish Navy, based on Haulbowline Island, a short drive south from Cork. 'We have a fleet of eight ships, but we can only get two or three out at any one time. Certainly two, but three at a push, which makes it impossible to try and patrol our waters,' explains retired Irish Naval Commander Eugene Ryan. 'To try and patrol our area of operations, which is 132,000 square nautical miles, with two ships, is like trying to patrol Munster with one squad car.' Ryan understands the problem better than almost anyone, having headed the anti-drugs unit of the Irish Navy for 15 years before retiring in 2012. On top of this he was a founding member of the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, Narcotics (MAOC-N), based in Lisbon which co-ordinates the anti-narcotics response across seven European nations. 'The irony is, we've never had better equipment,' Ryan continues. 'We have the finest ships' surveillance equipment you can buy. We're also using equipment like drones, satellite info, and reliable intel from MAOC-N. The problem is we can't get the ships to sea because we don't have the manpower. Many of our Junior Officers, Senior Non-Commissioned Officers and Ratings who were experienced technicians, and navigators, have left the navy because of better job offers and better paid jobs ashore.' Ryan believes the Navy has suffered a 'brain drain' over the past ten to 15 years. Though perhaps it's more accurate to describe it as a haemorrhage. 'Up to 2012, non-commissioned officer salaries were on a par with what was happening onshore. But then for some reason, maybe after the crash in 2008, jobs ashore started paying a lot better and so a lot of our people started leaving. I don't blame them for leaving because they were able to stay at home every night and be home at weekends, and they were getting a lot more money.' So what next? Thankfully, the Irish Government has come to terms with the scale of the problem as has recently injected €14million of funding into the Haulbowline Naval Base and is actively hiring into the Navy on improved terms.  However, as Ryan explains: 'You can't solve the problem overnight. It takes a number of years to train recruits to naval standards. You just don't go in and put on a uniform and that's you sorted.' Of course, smugglers operating down the Irish coastline is nothing new. In the 19th century, the town of Clonakilty was dubbed 'Little Dunkirk' for the amount of brandy illegally brought in. Like the booze runners of old, today's drugs smugglers seem not only to have the upper hand against the authorities, but practically a free pass. In the US, Donald Trump changed the strategy towards small boats carrying narcotics from interception to destruction. Since September last year, this 'shoot-first' approach to what Trump has called 'narcoterrorists' has claimed more than 200 lives off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. No one in Ireland is suggesting the Irish Defence Force follows suit. Not yet, anyhow.