Date Published: {J}

I have to admit that my knowledge of the Colombian cocaine cartels comes from films like Clear And Present Danger – with Harrison Ford playing CIA agent Jack Ryan battling some spectacularly evil people indeed.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that the cartels might become central to the Irish drugs trade – but that was the extraordinary link posed by RTE Crime Correspondent Paul Reynolds in a riveting lecture to NUI Galway Law Society last week.

He gave a frightening glimpse into the dark world of drugs – a €5 million per day trade in Ireland. And, he said, the gangs have gone truly international – with nine Irish criminal gangs operating on the Continent forming alliances with the Turks, who are the middlemen to supplying heroin to Europe.

“Irish criminals are doing direct deals for cocaine with Colombian cartels,” Reynolds told the audience.

“We should be worried about the amount of drugs coming in. €5million per day is what the market is worth . . . that is some business to go into. There is €5 million to be made in the business every day . . . the amount of money that can be made is staggering.”

He said that 50kilos of heroin bought for €1 million, would mean that a drugs gang would make €10 million. That was a “hell of a return” and explained why they were prepared to fight and kill to retain control, or to oust others.

The result was the type of criminal feuds which were now going on in a number of centres around the country, while the diversity of drugs now on offer – including the so-called ‘businessman’s drug’, cocaine – meant that drugs had infected all areas of society, though the neighbourhoods which had been devastated were usually the deprived ones.

The devastation was not confined to poorer areas, he said. Drugs gangs knew that if they were dealing with people from the business and professional classes, that ‘mummy or daddy would pay-up’, or the gangs would shoot their sons and daughters who were using cocaine and were in debt to the gangs.

Reynolds said in some cases, it was not an exaggeration to say the gangs were better armed than the Gardaí, and guns were often used as a sort of ‘sweetener’ in a drugs deal. The international suppliers frequently just put in a few guns with the shipment, and these were later on the streets – with the current favourite appearing to be the Glock, which could fire 16 single rounds, or bursts.

“I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that criminals are better armed than the Gardaí,” said Reynolds, who added that the paramilitary arsenal had also seeped into the drugs trade.

The use of drugs by hitmen, said Reynolds, meant that you now had gunmen who had no inhibitions, no reservations, who had become dehumanised. The cold-blooded shooting of a number of absolutely innocent people had shown the scale of the aggression and dehumanisation in the modern hitman, who was very often in the teens or twenties and high on drugs.

He warned that drug dealers and hitmen could be a sort of celebrity in the eyes of young people who were uneducated, abused, unemployed and had no future. The gang members were the ones with the flash cars, the girlfriends, the big houses, the drugs, the guns.

There was also the danger of very young kids being recruited as “baby dealers and boy soldiers”. He said one youngster picked up by Gardaí in Limerick was carrying a shotgun which was bigger than himself. Many of the individuals now going into the drugs business were “young . . . going straight in at the top, violent, highly unstable, and more dangerous because they have access to guns”.

The background causes of crime increase were population increase, poverty, poor education, drugs, marginalisation of certain areas of cities and towns, an education system which often meant that youngsters at 12 could not read or write, alcohol abuse – with 80% of all crime being related in some way to alcohol abuse.

He said drugs crime needed a societal response – there must never be a sort of half-acceptance of a level of crime and violence. We had not seen a repeat of the outrage that manifested itself when Veronica Guerin was murdered. Anyone who wanted to see the effects not just on gang members killing each other, but ordinary people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, should look up the website www.innocentvictimsofviolence.ie

On the issue of sentencing, Reynolds said that in his opinion, there seemed to be reluctance on the part of judges to hand down the type of long sentences which the Government had expected when mandatory minimum sentences were being set.

Asked how society might tackle the growth of gangland drugs crime, Reynolds said that we had to have a response by society. We also had to come up with radical solutions – we probably had to start with education, but in a way that would tackle deprivation in communities.

No society should take a resource like its schools and open them at 9 in the morning and close them again at 3 in the afternoon. After school, they might, for instance, be voluntarily manned and used as centres for doing homework, for games, for kids socialising, for keeping them off the streets and out of danger, but with discipline to ensure they had a responsibility as well for their actions.

Society should be really radical and feed those kids, if necessary, in the evening. In many cases, if they were let on to the streets, they were in danger of being out all night, of going home to a home where there was no one, where there was alcohol or drugs abuse, where they might be abused themselves . . . the school could provide a place of safety.

If necessary, they should be able to sleep there on mattresses on the floor and then a group of ‘super cleaners’ should be brought in at seven in the morning to have the place ready to be a school again when 9am came. That was the kind of radical action that was needed in the longer term.

Date Published: {J}

Well, it just shows – you never know when your luck might turn in this game of politics. Last June, after a Local Elections defeat, the political future of Niall Ó Brolcháin looked bleak indeed, but now he is the Green Party nominee to fill a Seanad vacancy and the odds are stacked-up in his favour.

You see, only TDs and Senators can vote to fill two vacancies in the Seanad – and a deal was worked out between the Government parties (Fianna Fáil, the Green Party and former PDs), under which Fianna Fáil will take one of the vacancies, and the other will go to the Green Party nominee (in this case, the nominee chosen at the weekend is Ó Brolcháin).

All going according to plan, one seat will go to Fianna Fáil’s Councillor James Carroll, of Drogheda, who is being groomed as a possible FF candidate in Louth (to join Minister Dermot Ahern), now that Seamus Kirk TD has been elevated to Ceann Comhairle.

The plan is that the other Senate vacancy will go to Ó Brolcháin . . . it was the seat formerly held by Labour’s Alan Kelly, who had to resign the Seanad when he won a seat in the European Parliament in June.

The Greens wrung the deal from Fianna Fáil as part of the renegotiated Programme for Government, and, barring some extraordinary electoral accident, Ó Brolcháin should take his place in the Seanad after the vote by TDs and Senators on December 14.

Speaking to Ó Brolcháin at the weekend, he said he was delighted and honoured to be nominated for The Green Party. Understandably, he was a little bit cautious about any celebrations – just yet. After all, this was the man tipped widely to be a TD in 2007.

Ó Brolcháin had 10 years as a Green councillor on Galway City Council and stood in two General Elections in Galway West – where he got just over 2,000 first preferences in 2002 and over 3,000 in 2007. He was heavily tipped as a hot favourite to take a Dáil seat only a month prior to the 2007 General Election in an opinion poll produced by TG4.

That forecast he would be in the shake-up for the two final seats with Frank Fahey (FF), and Noel Grealish (PD).But, he survived to just the 9th count where he had 4,300 votes and was then eliminated.

At the time, it looked possible that, if he kept slogging away as a local councillor in Galway, he might be in with a shout as a potential Green TD. After all, Michael D Higgins (Labour) stood in the same constituency in 1969, ’73 and ’77 before he was first elected to the Dáil in 1981.

 Higgins lost that seat in 1982 and finally began a run of success as a TD for Galway West right from 1987 to the present day.

However, Ó Brolcháin suffered a colossal reverse for his political aspirations in the Local Elections last June when the Greens sustained an enormous defeat nationally in the Locals.

As a sitting councillor, Ó Brolcháin got just over 700 votes in the West Ward in Galway City. He was seventh in the first preferences but was a long way from the 1,400 quota and lost his elected base, the Galway City Council seat. He has been working since as a full-time official for The Green Party as a parliamentary secretary.

Ó Brolcháin has also been continuing with his constituency work and said at the weekend …. “in this politics business, you never know what’s around the corner. The party did badly in June but I believe it is still very much alive and active around the country and the issues just won’t go away. I would be honoured and delighted if I was elected a Senator.”

In the meantime, if this Government were to last another two years – who knows what changes there might be in Galway West. For instance, would Higgins be standing again? Would Fahey? Would Fine Gael’s Padraic McCormack?

INDEPENDENT MY AR**

Meanwhile, there was some ‘fighting talk’ in the background at that Fine Gael conference held in Galway last week – and one of the clear targets that emerged was that, as far as they’re concerned, Grealish may be standing as an Independent in the next General Election, but FG regard him as ‘a Government TD’.

Leading the attack was Fine Gael hopeful Councillor Padraig Conneely, who dismissed Grealish as “Independent my ar**”.

He said Grealish and Mary Harney, the last remnants of the Progressive Democrats, had consistently supported the Fianna Fáil-led Government which had led the country into the ruinous financial situation of the past year.

“When it comes to election time I have no doubt that Noel Grealish will have posters up around the place with lines like ‘keep an Independent voice in Galway West’. The fact is that he and Mary Harney have supported this ruinous Fianna Fáil-led administration in every single Dáil vote for years. He is Fianna Fáil in all but name and it is time that this lie was nailed,” Conneely said.

Conneely said that in the past week, for instance, Phil Hogan TD had put down a Fine Gael motion in the Dáil calling for a freeze on all commercial rates in a bid to give retail businesses around the country a chance of survival. But it had been voted down by the Government. So, the ex-PDs, who claimed to be Independents, were nothing of the sort.

“We in Fine Gael on Galway City Council – through people like myself and Councillor Brian Walsh – are involved in discussions here in Galway in a bid to freeze the rates for businesses. Involved in those talks as well are the three ex-PDs who now are supporting Grealish (Cllrs Declan McDonnell, Donal Lyons and Terry O’Flaherty), but in the Dáil, the ex-PDs can support a policy which is the precise opposite.

“It is time that Grealish came clean about precisely where he stands – we intend to make it clear to the electorate that he may call himself an Independent, but in fact he is a ‘Government TD’ like Frank Fahey or Éamon Ó Cuív and it is time he stopped this nonsense about being an Independent. Independent my ar**,” added Conneely.

Meantime, though Grealish has been playing his cards pretty close to his chest on precisely what ‘banner’ he plans to run under in the next General Election, it is quite clear that he plans to run as an Independent – and he has brushed off those approaches from both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to join them.In the wake of the PD wipeout in the 2007 General Election, Grealish and Harney were the only two surviving PD Dáil Deputies. Harney kept her post as Minister for Health, while both herself and Grealish have proven rock-solid supporters of the Fianna Fáil-Green-Independents Government. Grealish has become a backbencher with an Independent label, and a considerable ability to get the ear of ministers.

It is hard to gauge precisely where his vote comes from, but Grealish with his 5,800 first preferences in 2007, must have looked carefully at the vote and analysed it when those approaches came to join Fianna Fáil (from Ministers Ó Cuív and Noel Dempsey), and then from some of the top people in Fine Gael who wanted him on their team.

The easier one to rule out must surely have been the approach from Fine Gael. For, though FG are on the up in the opinion polls, all of the Grealish family connections going back for years are in Fianna Fáil. Grealish himself started as a Fianna Fáil Cumann officer when he was in his teens, and, if he joined FG, he would lose a chunk of that support, plus whatever slice of FF support came to him when Bobby Molloy retired. Molloy, after all, had more than 20 years as a Fianna Fáil TD and then 16 years as a PD Dáil Deputy.

Grealish obviously gave a lot longer thought to those approaches to join Fianna Fáil . . . the word is that they would still like to have him on board, but, right now, does he really want to join a party which is running at just over 20% in the opinion polls and which is associated with the economic catastrophe of the past year? FF may be slightly less unpopular right now and they look like – with Green support – they could last a few years yet in office, but the memory of the Local and European Elections drubbing for FF is a little too fresh in the minds of many. Grealish has been keeping his powder dry but he won’t go to Fianna Fáil.

Anyway, they have enough problems in Fianna Fáil with the three likely candidates – Ó Cuív, Fahey and Cllr Michael Crowe – all battling for their own futures and wanting Grealish’s name on the FF ‘slate’ like a hole in the head.

Date Published: {J}

American jazz singer Maria Tecce brings her acclaimed show Viva, featuring Argentinian and Spanish songs, Italian arias, jazz, and the poetry of Pablo Neruda, to the Town Hall Theatre on Saturday, November 28.

The former Galway resident, who is now based in Dublin where she also has a busy acting career, has been singing from a very young age.

“When I was a kid my mom was always singing in the house,” says Boston born Maria. “She was a classical pianist. All of us played instruments – all the kids – and we all played and sang. It was a little Italian Von Trapp family! We were always playing at reunions and stuff like that.”

Despite this background, Maria didn’t plan a career as a professional musician.“To be honest with you I never thought of making my living through music, at all,” she explains. “I wanted to be a veterinarian; I wanted to ride horses, when I was a kid. I didn’t have any notions of becoming a professional musician; it just happened when I came over to Ireland.

“I came here about nine years ago now, “Maria continues. “And it was just a way of picking up extra money. I really like Irish music, the whole sitting down and playing and having jam sessions, which was very similar to what I grew up with in folk and blues.”

Returning to Galway with this show has a special resonance for Maria, who had her first paid work as a singer in the town.

“My first gig was the best gig, I think, I’ve ever had,” she recalls. “It was in Nimmo’s Wine Bar. It was every Sunday night, I played for an hour and I sat in the corner with my little Spanish guitar and sang songs. And I got 40 pounds and my dinner and as much wine as I could drink. Great gig!” With an accomplished band backing her up, the singer’s latest show was described by The Irish Times as “seductive”, and given that Maria is such a theatrical performer, this is a show that promises to enliven the senses.

“Viva was inspired by a poem by Pablo Neruda, called Me Gustas Cuando Callas,” Maria explains. “I’d studied Spanish when I was in high school; I loved the language. I started collecting songs in Italian and Spanish, and it was the music of the language that attracted me most; the sensuality, the fecundity and the stories of these songs.”

Maria is also influence by artists like Carmen McCrae, Joni Mitchell and Annie Lennox. Recently, she’s been expanding her tastes further.

“I’ve been influenced by opera lately too,” she says. “It’s all about telling stories, the drama and theatricality of opera. It’s about love and sex and death and all sorts of juicy stuff like that!”Maria Tecce’s other career as an actor means her schedule is pretty hectic, but it’s something she enjoys.

“This year was a great year for me as far as acting goes. I did a film with Jack L, which was great fun. That’s called I Love Musicals. Then I did an encore performance of [Hugh Leonard’s] Roman Fever, in Bewley’s Café theatre

.“The acting has been very good for me, and I learn a bit more each time I do it,” she adds. “I’m not a trained musician; I’m not a trained actor. The way I’ve learned is just by doing.”

Is juggling two busy careers not a strain?

“No, I don’t find it difficult at all,” she states. “I find they dovetail quite easily. There’s a conflict in projects coming up in March so we’ll see what see what happens. I tend to think that these things work themselves out, they go the way they’re supposed to go.”

Maria finds that the disciplines of acting and singing can complement each other.

“I do think it comes from a similar impulse,” she says. “For me the catalyst in singing is the music; in acting I have the text. In songs you have the text as well, but you also have the music as an extra catalyst. But I think there’s musicality in language as well; and if you’re lucky and you get a great writer, like Hugh Leonard, there’s so much musicality in his language that it’s a joy to play the role.”

So far this year Maria Tecce has had a month’s run in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as playing shows in Dubrovnik, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, London and New York. Where do all these gigs come from?

“I do all my own booking,” explains the singer. “I don’t have a manager, I do everything myself. It’s a lot of administrative work; I’d be more than happy to hand it over to someone who wanted to do my bookings. That would be the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon that I see.”

Being your own boss allows a certain freedom but it can have its price artistically.

“It does take a lot of my energy and it does take a lot of hours,” says Maria. “If I had my way I’d devote more energy to the creative side of things, where I could develop more music or another show, or I could try to find money to record my next album. There are lots of little hats to be worn and the last thing I get to do sometimes is step on stage.

“I think it has its pros and cons, like any job,” Maria says about her career. “It is insecure, inconsistent – sometimes – but I’ve lots of friends who’ve lost their jobs recently. The benefit of it is to do something I love, something I have passion for. Once I step on stage all the problems, anything, it all falls away. I can lose myself in the music and that is a gift; it’s a gift I could never put a price tag on.”

Maria Tecce’s love for what she does comes through in her winning performances, and Viva is a show well worth catching.“I feel like the luckiest woman in the world some days, I really do,” she says. “It’s tough, and I wouldn’t recommend it anyone, but if it’s in your heart and you can’t live without it, you have to do it.”

Maria Tecce plays the Town Hall Theatre on Saturday, November 28 at 8pm. Tickets €18/€16 from www.tht.ie or 091-569777.