Original subtitles

The following programme contains strong language and flashing images.

I can nearly smell the mushrooms.

Magic mushrooms.

Growing up, I would have used a lot of recreational drugs...

...but ecstasy was my favourite drug.

And I smile. I'm not a good advert for "don't do drugs" or anything.

So...

But the first time I took ecstasy, the thing that stands out to me now

is the sharpness of my vision.

I remember just really appreciating the pattern of the wallpaper.

And I remember thinking, "Why don't I walk around every day on my estate

and appreciate things?

Why don't I go, 'Oh, my God! Look at that beautiful flower'?"

Dublin used to be about the gaggle,

about the pints, about the pub.

And then it wasn't... it was about the rave.

It was about ecstasy.

The whole purpose of the rave scene was we were there to dance.

And that's what we did. And we danced and we danced and we danced!

You know. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Everybody was happy.

If you took ecstasy, it was like walking up a stepladder

and then getting to the top.

And then for two and a half hours, it was euphoria.

You were up there with the clouds or up there with the gods.

You know what I mean?

It was very easy to buy batches of ecstasy,

and start your own little part to play in selling drugs.

There was so much money coming in,

and I didn't feel at the time I was doing anything wrong.

I was giving someone a beautiful experience.

Back in the '80s,

the drug business was in its infancy,

but ecstasy just took hold all of a sudden,

and certain prominent criminals

saw the good profits that were to be made

and were very quick to adapt to this whole new phenomenon.

It was a recipe for disaster.

♪ Here I go, falling down, down, down

♪ My mind is a blank

♪ My head is spinning around and around

♪ As I go deep into the funnel of love ♪

- Get me that bag. - What?

That bag.

"Poverty and decay in Dublin.

The whole country is sliding down the road to economic ruin."

"Many people are utterly depressed and pessimistic

about the economic situation in our country."

"There is no future economically for Ireland.

We are bunched, banjaxed and spifflicated."

We are rearing our children for the export boat,

and they should get on it and get out as soon as possible.

How many can see their future outside this country?

As a young gay man growing up in Dublin,

it was a quite brutal experience.

It was illegal to be gay until 1993 in Ireland.

You could get two years in prison for holding hands

or kissing in public or in private.

You could also get ten years in prison for intercourse.

I believe it to be an abnormality.

I do find the physical act absolutely revolting in the extreme.

Going to a dance club where I could actually just unburden myself,

there was something enormously self-empowering about that.

This was the main entrance to Side's dance club when it first opened.

There was just simply nothing like it in Dublin at the time.

Happy memories.

Side's opened in Dublin in 1986

and E started to come into Dublin

in significant quantities by the summer of that year.

And they were in little capsules and they were so strong.

There was such a ritual to it. They were so strong,

you'd pop open the capsule and you'd you just dish out half of the powder

and then keep the rest back in, keep that till later on.

The effect of one little pill on a city

is that it unlocks this code.

And the next thing is you had working class straight boys,

you had middle class gay women

and everybody in between

just caught up in this communal experience.

And it very quickly became embraced and consumed by the masses.

When this city took ecstasy, it created harmony.

The gender or the sexuality or the politics or the colour,

you just didn't see it, it wasn't a thing.

You could be a working class fella rubbing down a gay barrister's son.

In this setting, it doesn't matter.

Are you coming up?

That's all that matters.

♪ MOBY: Go

I can still feel the euphoric rush going through me now...

just as I did back then.

The rave scene began to explode

and develop itself into a bigger thing.

Dance music became a culture.

We'd be guaranteed to have maybe 3,000-5,000 people in the place.

And we had the bigger raves, the Olympic Ballroom,

the Mansion House.

I remember the first time walking into the Mansion House.

It was incredible, the feeling!

It was, like, intense with heat.

Everyone is... pounding hard, shouting.

Blowing the whistles.

Just... the feeling of being in that building with your people...

...it was just so powerful.

Ecstasy works as a magic pill.

It was just like, you know,

a magician literally flicked his fingers

and you were just taken from one place to another place,

deported into this absolute world of just magic.

You know, as a young little kid you were known by your clothes.

It was how you really expressed who you were.

We would have had our curly hair

and, sure, we'd be dancing out on the street.

I would have been around 14 or 15 the first time I took an ecstasy.

Quite young... quite vulnerable.

And, you know, a girl. I was not long after making me confirmation,

let's be real here. I made me confirmation when I was 12.

So two years down the line,

I'm in raves and I'm dancing and taking drugs.

I took an oath in me confirmation not to take drugs. Sorry.

How did you come to start selling E?

I would have been one of the ones that would have been dancing around,

mingling in with the crowd, meeting new people

and introducing them to what I had.

Yeah, I was very good at talking about the drug that I took

and how it was doing for me.

And I think they already knew, cos I was dancing pretty well,

and my hair looked great and my clothes looked amazing.

So they were like, "Who's she?"

So we created an audience,

and we captured people very quickly.

We used to use a Kinder egg, the plastic,

so you were able to fill them up with ecstasy,

so they'd be everywhere on your person, you know,

in your pockets and stuff.

And that was the start of it.

I believe that we were tasting something so new, so different,

and I was gonna promote it really well.

Dublin in the late '80s,

ecstasy comes along. And I happened to be in charge of a drug unit

in the inner city where all the raves were taking place.

It was relatively inexpensive to make,

it was very easily stored, very easily transported,

and very easily distributed once you got it into the country.

Through our investigations, we found this new drug, this MDMA,

was primarily coming in through the Netherlands.

Being made in back street garages, in back street labs

by chemists who imported the components from China

and made up ecstasy tablets in all shapes, forms and colours.

And they sent 'em throughout Europe, throughout the globe.

All sorts of tablets were being sold to these young people.

There was no quality assurance.

It was a bit like Russian roulette.

But you could make an ecstasy tablet back in the '90s for maybe 50 cents,

maybe even less.

You could sell it at that time for 25 euros a tablet.

A massive mark up.

For drug dealers in Dublin this was a massive opportunity.

There wasn't that many people selling it at that time.

In the club, the Olympic Ballroom, you were getting 1,000 people,

Friday, Saturday, sometimes Sunday.

Even if you only took one E each...

So we went up and we took it over. We were tooled.

Tooled? What does that mean? Weapons, you know.

Guns?

Weapons.

Padraig.

Put your hand in.

Root around you fucking muppet.

The white dove.

Each one contains 200 milligrams of methylenedioxy-methamphetamine.

That's MDMA to yous fucking geniuses.

These little fuckers... are gonna make us minted!

I classed meself in my own head as an entrepreneur back then.

And I was a go-getter.

This is Millbrook Field. This was a den of iniquity back in the day.

So, anything you wanted, you got... you got here.

And this is where we used to sell the hash

from five to seven every day.

The police used to raid this field,

so we had to be a step ahead of them.

So, see the yellow flowers?

Buttercups.

So what we would do is we would pull out a sod of grass,

put all of the drugs, and then we'd just put the sod back down.

And if you look at all the walls, they'd be our exit routes.

We used to just climb up, bounce, you'd be over.

And once you're gone into a back garden, that's it.

They'd be lucky if they caught anybody.

When the rave scene kicked off, I was able to utilise

the trade route that I already had from the hash.

It was just a natural progression.

I already had not only the workforce,

but I also had... a captive audience, you know what I mean.

The first E I got were California sunrises.

I got 1,000. So I paid 15,000 for them.

They really took off.

Then you had the love doves.

Then you had the snowballs.

My favourite was the mad bastards.

So now my figures are at 1,500 people,

Friday, Saturday, sometimes Sunday.

That's 4,500.

Every one of them wants an E, probably two.

You're looking at 9,000 E.

That's a lot of E.

I made a lot of money.

I could earn up to 10,000 a week.

Put it this way, I bought a house when I was 21.

But we always wanted, wanted, wanted.

.

Coming into the early '90s,

Ireland suddenly is a great footballing nation,

and Italia 90 greatly enhanced the psyche of the country.

People in Dublin were actually seeing a bit of hope.

There was a continued recession, high unemployment,

really high emigration,

but economically, you were seeing green shoots.

You had American factories opening up and offering employment.

And now here was this drug that suddenly made you feel brilliant.

And we took to that. We really took to that.

The way ecstasy was bought and sold

was very challenging for law enforcement in Ireland.

Lots of ordinary, decent people,

non-criminal people, college kids, were buying ecstasy .

And you were trying to pick the guys who were selling to figure out

who are they, where are they getting it, who was behind it,

who are bringing big amounts of it in and making huge profits.

In the early stages, we tried to raid them.

That proved too challenging.

My house would be raided regularly.

They'd even raid the house when I wasn't there.

They'd take something stupid out like a video recorder or something

just to justify the raid.

But they couldn't catch me. They tried their best,

but I was calculated. I didn't carry drugs.

My ecstasy was sold by other people.

The gang that I was with, we were getting some money,

you know, in our teenage years.

But the quicker it was coming in, the quicker you wanted it spent,

because it wasn't going into the bank.

I would spend my money on clothes and lovely dinners.

Eating out always, you know, I don't think I ever cooked.

We were able to get a car... a nice car.

We also put a deposit down on a property on a beautiful estate.

But time changed for me.

I mean, by the time I was 17, I became pregnant,

and I had to juggle.

One side of it was being a mother,

the other side of it was being a drug dealer.

It was always keeping the balls up in the air, you know,

but balls were dropping too.

It became bigger and more organised and everyone had a target,

you know, like, of how much you were gonna make in the night.

Initially, the ecstasy were carried in through your person,

but then they became thousands and you couldn't carry them in,

so they would have been packed off outside, maybe in a car.

This is definitely something that I would have wore.

My goodness! The pocket here. Oh, my God! It was filled with money.

There was our group from Ballyfermot

and we had these particular coloured boiler suits

and they all wore them.

So you're talking like, men, you know, seven, eight, ten men

wearing the same colour. It was quite intense,

it was quite intimidating.

Our clothing was definitely our uniform.

But there was also other groups in the rave

that were selling and doing their thing also.

The tension became real in the raves

and, you know, that's where you had to be mindful and watchful

of what you were doing, who you were talking to, you know,

because weapons became very much involved,

people were carrying.

I got called up to the toilet on the middle floor.

One of the lads from Ballyfermot, he took a piece out on me.

So, I grabbed it and I said, "Pull the fucking thing!

Pull it!" He pulled away. "You're not fucking right!"

I remember, you go up into this nightclub,

you're on the ground floor, first floor, second floor, third floor,

different looking fuckers, fuckers who weren't there to dance,

fuckers who were there to collect.

We were all kids raving, these looked like men.

These looked like fuckers not to be fucked with.

They look at you once and that's it.

I remember going into a place and a fella just headbutted me,

that's it, there's no conversation. Just like, bang, "Fuck off!"

What do you say to fuck off?

You don't say anything, you just fuck off.

The old system... wasn't working.

We figured we needed people

who you would not think would be... police.

People on the inside.

In the past, I had done a lot of undercover work

in relation to the heroin scene...

...but ten years had moved on and I needed a corresponding crew

who were young enough and could talk the talk

and effectively blend in in some of these raves.

And one day, I was in the police canteen

and I saw this band of youngsters,

who were maybe three, four weeks in the Guards

at the beginning of their training programme,

who all looked about 17 or 18.

And I thought they would know more about the rave scene

certainly than I did.

How's it going? My name's Detective Sergeant

Michael O'Sullivan of the Drug Squad.

So I sat down with a number of them and asked them

who would have the nerve to go to the rave clubs

and identify the guys who were selling ecstasy,

to buy the drugs, so that we could then arrest the dealer.

I need new faces, young recruits, who can pass off as clubbers.

Who's up for it?

And there were four or five of them who stepped up to the mark

and said they'd give it a go.

I wanted 'em to look... seedy. I wanted 'em to look exhausted.

I wanted 'em to look like they were on ecstasy.

So I said to 'em, "Do me a favour, I know it sounds silly," I said,

"Don't wash your hair."

To see them transformed, I thought to myself,

if they could act as well as they looked, they'd get away with it.

We had a product that was really, really good,

and we were gonna protect that as much as we could

to get the money that we deserved for being there

and doing what we were doing.

I tried not to carry any more than 5,000 on me.

I was only there for probably an hour

and I was having to get rid of that money.

But it was constant money just flowing, flowing, you know.

One of our guys would be on the motorbike in the city centre

and he would be collecting and dropping.

We became aware that a number of gangs

were being supplied by one individual on a motorbike.

We built up the intelligence and the evidence

and we realised the Olympic Ballroom was the centre,

the place to sell it.

♪ If your name's not down, you're not coming in ♪

It was packed with young people.

The heat, the chaos, almost bursting at the doors.

♪ If your name's not down, you're not coming in ♪

A lot of criminals, a lot of drug dealers...

and for the undercover, quite junior police officers

to work in there, it was a nightmare.

♪ If your name's not down... Not tonight ♪

The Olympic would have been the main one that I would have went to.

♪ If your name's not down, you're not coming in ♪

You would nearly taste the sweat.

Everyone is pumping, dancing.

And I knew walking in my people were there.

And I knew I was safe walking over to them.

♪ Not tonight, you're not on the list ♪

On the first night, I briefed four of the young people,

and I said, "Keep the dealer in sight.

And if he leaves, you leave and we'll look after the rest."

Were you ever aware of undercover police in the clubs?

Well, it's like everything else,

you're always told, you know, who's who.

Either someone got a tip off somewhere along the line

and they're saying, "Watch this fella, that fella."

But the ecstasy did make you a little bit paranoid.

And, you know, you'd be like, "Oh, they're watching me!"

It was hard to tell.

If someone says to you, "That's a copper."

You're kind of looking at them going, "Is it?

Are you sure? I've just spoke to him."

They look like they're out of it,

they look like they've taken something.

The undercover police were on their own for several hours.

I was down the street in a doorway...

...filled with, er... trepidation, really.

As regards backup, they had no radio.

The undercover cops, you know, they were young,

they dressed like us, they actually danced like us.

One of them, I remember, she had curly hair like me,

she could have been my sister.

What's the story, love?

I'm looking for a few E's.

Are you, yeah? Could I got a couple of yokes?

Some pills?

Yeah.

Do I look like a fucking dealer to you?

Well... I think there's a fella over there you could try.

I literally just saw you.

Piss off, will ya?

The doors of the nightclub opened and 700-800 young people came out.

And the undercover officers, all of them identified a dealer.

They were subsequently arrested.

.

And as a result of those arrests and the evidence obtained,

we had the premises closed down.

I was never caught by undercover police,

but you were always on guard

and being very watchful of what was going on,

but it could have happened. And that was the risk you took,

and that was probably the thrill out of the whole lot of it too.

It was, "I'm gonna get one over you. You're not gonna catch me."

But with the closedown of the Olympic,

it was like a sweep that came into the city centre.

Then the rave scene changed.

That's when underground stuff really started to take off.

Down the country, fields, they went everywhere to dance.

♪ Oh, is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?

♪ Or just 20,000 people standing in a field

♪ And I don't quite understand just what this feeling is

♪ But that's OK, cos we're all sorted out for E's and wizz ♪

We took over a building site up in Ballyfermot.

It started on about the 24th of December

and then went on to about the 8th of January

before everybody got tired and went - home. - So how many days is that?

I don't know, you tell me.

I don't... I ain't counting. Maybe two weeks, like.

Non-stop? Non-stop, yeah, no problem.

Were you aware the police were starting to target clubs and things?

They tried. They tried, but you could never beat us.

We were one step ahead of them all the time.

Sometimes you would take over houses that were being built.

Somebody would have the decks and we'd set up raves every night.

If you go up that road there, where that railings is,

go down there, there used to be a priest's house there

and the priest was gone. I don't know where he was gone.

And someone said there was a rave in the priest's house.

When they opened the door, I mean,

tens of us jumped out from behind a wall into the house.

But the decks was there, they were playing all the fucking tunes.

And the whole house was like a '90s inner-city club

transported into the priest's house. in Killinarden.

It was one of the best nights ever, I swear to God.

Some people would say I spent most of my career on drugs,

erm, metaphorically, so I was involved from the very early '80s

when heroin hit Dublin all the way through my career.

Back in the early '90s, what you saw with the gangs,

the way they developed,

was the drug business was becoming more profitable,

more organised and more sophisticated.

And they were trying to get better product at better prices.

And we had intelligence that one particular gang

were trying to set up their production here in Ireland.

Their intention was to be able to produce

hundreds of thousands of tablets.

And they had even procured a chemist.

Fellas... this is Thomas.

He's from the UK and he's a chemist.

All right, Thomas.

We no longer just sell yokes...

...we make 'em.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we have a result.

Ireland are the winners of this year's Eurovision Song Contest.

The mid-'90s in Ireland was an interesting time.

We had won loads of Eurovisions back to back.

Riverdance was out.

The Late Late Show had Boyzone on

and they were being presented as this new clean version of Ireland.

But, meanwhile, I was looking out my window

it wasn't squeaky clean Ireland...

...it was scary.

By the mid-'90s, it was kind of like the rave scene became affected.

An awful lot of people really went out of their way to get too high.

And they couldn't find their way down.

They would call it, like, a youth gaggle.

It meant that they'd been taking E all night

and the E is starting to wear off.

A lot of people would report that their first time using heroin

was actually after being at a rave and taking ecstasy.

And the heroin would help them come down from the E.

There's a link between heroin and ecstasy in cities like Dublin,

Manchester, Liverpool, London.

When the party... continues, and it was non-stop,

and people started to make huge money

on the back of all this happiness and music,

and filling venues and warehouses, there was a comedown.

There was a huge, lovely high, but there's a comedown.

And at the very bottom of that comedown there's a space for heroin.

I wasn't allowed to take heroin.

It was actually the golden rule, you weren't to take it.

But rules were there to be broken and I always broke the rules.

I couldn't smoke it in front of me children,

I was always in the bathroom with the door locked doing it.

No one really seeing what I was doing or smoking,

so me habit became quite big in a very, very short time.

We thought we were the most powerful things and we were untouchable...

...but the heroin just took over.

I remember the first time I used heroin,

it was just an experiment.

But there was something in it, or there was something in me,

the heroin filled a void.

If I had a car, I wanted your car.

If I had a house, I wanted your house.

I had a girlfriend, I wanted your girlfriend,

You know, there was always that want in me, you know,

trying to fill that void.

And the heroin done that. It subdued you.

Subdued the thinking, your emotions, your feelings.

I just wanted to stop hurting.

I was raped and abused for a number of years,

erm... by a priest in the local area.

I was an altar boy.

This priest was involved in the youth club,

he was involved in the school,

and he'd be at you in the showers or in the swimming pool.

Being so young, not even knowing what's going on with ya,

you know, erm, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years of age,

I don't know how to manage that.

And the power and control that that has...

So it was like, "Give me fucking gear or I'm gonna kill someone."

You know what I mean, or I'm gonna kill meself.

That's a bad place to be in, that sickness in your head like,

that violence like, you know, in your head.

I can feel it rising in me here, you know. Erm...

It's a long time since it's had that power over me.

But, erm... I never wanted to be that person,

and the heroin just blocked out everything.

But, eventually...

I was actually out on the streets meself... selling bags,

you know what I mean, of heroin, just to keep a habit.

There was one day when I went down to source my heroin

for the rest of the week...

...and left with the drugs.

The Guards just swarmed the car.

And that was it, there was no getting away from it.

And I went to the courts with my father.

Me dad just turned and looked at me and he said, "Run!"

And so that day I ran out of the car

and I got the ferry over to the UK.

So that's where it really, really got messy for me.

...carrying drugs around the UK and also back in to Dublin.

A lot of Irish criminals had made a lot of contacts overseas.

Traffickers were using mules who were sometimes addicts,

sometimes people who were willing to do it for money.

And there were a lot of bigger seizures.

You could have 25,000, you may even have 50,000 tablets.

But by 1995, we felt that we had enough of an evidential trail

to actually raid a warehouse being used by an Irish man

suspected of involvement in very large scale drug distribution.

Oi, mask!

Armed Garda! Get on the fucking floor!

Let me see your fucking hands!

There were three people arrested.

All of these guys were later convicted.

But, unfortunately, there wasn't enough evidence available

to actually charge the criminal behind this operation.

And his drug business continued to grow.

The person who's at the top of the pyramid is rarely hands on.

And in the '90s, if you got into the drugs business

and you didn't use the product, and you distributed it properly,

and you were sufficiently far up the chain,

you were not in all probability going to be caught.

And when cocaine came along there was a lot of money to be made.

All sorted.

Be on time. Don't fuck it up!

I never set out... to be a drug addict.

I never set out to be a survivor of sexual abuse.

I never set out to be a drug dealer.

But prison saved my life.

It gave me that break from society.

It gave me that break from being that perceived hard man.

Prohibition in Ireland has no evidence.

You're never going to have a war on drugs because drugs are an object,

you know, they're a substance, the war will always be on people.

We just need a much more sensible approach to drug use in Ireland.

I was smoking heroin.

I was taking crack.

And... I'd just had enough.

I just said, "I don't wanna be a part of this world anymore."

I went to a church that I made me confirmation in.

I had the drugs cooked, the syringe was ready...

...and I wanted to die outside of the church.

I went to light a candle for me children.

I went in to light a candle for me parents,

because it was my way of saying, "I'm sorry."

And a lady walked over to me and she just placed her hand on me shoulder

and she said, "Light a candle for yourself."

And I walked out of the church and I threw me drugs away,

like I was burying them, because something had to die that day.

And within two weeks, I went into treatment.

"Welcome to the Celtic Tiger."

All of a sudden, everybody was a millionaire.

Cocaine just became all part of that.

There was a gang that heard about me driving skills,

and they offered me a bit of work as a courier.

My nickname was Tarzan, cos I had a 21" neck.

It was easy.

If I wanted to, I could have brought in a fucking elephant.

The Guards just didn't have the knowledge

how to bring these guys down.

They were untouchable. Mickey Mouse!

Veronica realised something had to be done.

I'm a crime reporter.

That's what I do and somebody has to do it.

The feeling was she was getting very close to someone very big.

It was the murder of a young mother and a journalist.

♪ CREDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL: Bad Moon Rising

♪ I see the bad moon rising

♪ I see trouble on the way

♪ Don't go around tonight

♪ Well, it's bound to take your life

♪ There's a bad moon on the rise ♪

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