The £30,000 was as grubby as money gets. It was tightly wrapped in bundles, probably after being buried somewhere on Michael Heeney's acre of land. There were £10s and £20s, the currency of the heroin street deal, and traces of the drug were found on the notes.
Navan gardai seized the money in a search of Heeney's land around his three-bedroom house outside Duleek, Co Meath, last September.
Known as Country Mick in the Dublin communities where he sold heroin, the 39-year-old coal merchant had been arrested by undercover gardai five months earlier on his nightly drug run to Dublin.
He was found with nine batches of heroin, or more than 150 street deals, ready to sell to addicts in the north inner city.
Heeney appeared an unlikely drug dealer. As a heroin wholesaler to at least five north Dublin dealers he had earlier made his living as a delivery man of a different kind.
From Drogheda, Co Louth, Heeney was well-known around Duleek and Drogheda as a coal merchant. The coal round, which he operated on his own, took in the village and surrounding townland.
He had no serious convictions, a road traffic offence from the 1970s and several small-time convictions for having cannabis for personal use. He had moved to the house at Keenogue less than two years previously and neighbours had already noticed some strange goings-on before his first arrest.
Heeney's coal lorry was still parked in the yard when gardai from the Dublin North Central Drugs Division found 10 oz, or more than a quarter-kilo of uncut heroin hidden up a tree in a camouflaged bag in October last year.
Heeney had quickly become a key member of a gang involved in heroin trafficking. He is believed to have been working for a London-based dealer, originally from the midlands.
Two members of the gang were sentenced in Dublin in the last year. Both were heroin wholesalers, like Heeney, taking delivery of large consignments bought in London from Turkish criminals. An Irish associate of the gang received a four-year sentence in London last week for having a half-kilo of heroin.
Heeney's involvement seemed to deepen after the arrest of another gang member in February 1997. The man was arrested with £500,000 worth of heroin and a sawn-off shotgun.
According to gardai it was in February that Heeney gave up the coal business for good and began his trips to Dublin. When he was arrested in October 1997 he had progressed to delivering quarter-ounces of uncut heroin to large dealers.
He and his wife both had heroin habits, smoking the drug rather than injecting it, and they lived in what one source described as squalor.
Although the £30,000 was among several large cash seizures Heeney was not spending the money on the lavish lifestyle associated with drug barons.
Last night the independent TD, Mr Tony Gregory, called on judges to start implementing life sentences for drug dealers.
"In 1984 the Misuse of Drugs Act brought in life sentences for drug dealers. Judges are handing out fairly severe sentences now, but heroin dealers a few years ago were getting average sentences of two or three years," he said.
"As legislators we were criticised for not responding to the issue. But we did respond 15 years ago, at the height of the drugs problem in the 1980s."
Mr Gregory claimed lighter sentences had contributed to the problem, by failing to deter criminals attracted by the large sums of money to be made out of heroin dealing.