Stephen Bannon’s hunt for an Irish Trump will fail, we think, because we are better at calling out hypocrisy. We are too savvy, too historically wounded, to tolerate the moral stench of brazenly contradictory positions that are matters of life and death. Even a child can see that Donald Trump has camouflaged a naked oil grab against Venezuela as cocaine trafficking charges. So far, so Trump.
But what leaves us slack-jawed is the hypocrisy; the fact that just a month ago, he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president convicted in the US on near identical charges to those levelled against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, who was no more than 18 months into a 45-year sentence.
As president, Hernandez was central to a drug-trafficking scheme characterised by US authorities as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world”, using the blood money to fund his political campaigns. He was deemed responsible for the “unfathomable destruction” cocaine had caused in the US, for flooding the country with over 400 tonnes of cocaine – equivalent to roughly 4.5 billion individual doses – and for turning his own country into one of the world’s most violent countries with one of the highest murder rates, according to the US state department data.
Trump merely saw another crucified victim like himself. “The man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump. This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country.”
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We’re mad that he pardoned a key figure in the cocaine facilitation. Hypocrisy seems too lame a word for it.
We know what cocaine users look like now. We’re accustomed to seeing pleasant individuals turn louder and more arrogant between their endless bathroom breaks.
For most of them, cocaine represents nothing more than a fun, cheap, low-calorie night out. The drug is so endemic and classless that when chefs were asked by the Sunday Independent if they catered to diners on weight-loss medication, one chef – the Unicorn’s Kristan Burness – told Lorna Siggins: “We have two pandemics in the restaurant business – Ozempic and cocaine”.
Anyone who thinks it’s still a case of finding a shady lad with a few dodgy bags have missed the marketing revolution. “Menus” ordered through Snapchat, Signal or WhatsApp are as slick and colourfully illustrated as any supermarket ad, featuring special deals and discounts for packages and combinations. One proudly claiming to have The Best Coke in the Whole Town, has a Hot Sale at €200; “2 bags of crystal flake and Win more than 0.5G for free”. If that’s not tempting enough to “buy and win”, they suggest you ask an “employee” to view the “full menu”.
[ Cocaine users are now older, better educated and more likely to be workingOpens in new window ]
A shop in central Dublin recently had €18 “cocaine kits” aka “snuff kits” for sale in its window; a neat little pouch with a mirror, razor blade, snorting tube, vial and metal spoon. We preachers to the world are world class at this. Ireland is ranked among the highest consumers of cocaine globally (joint fourth), according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. A 2023 analysis of used syringes by the ESCAPE network found cocaine in more than 90 per cent of syringes found in Dublin, the highest across 19 countries.
Yet in an era of relentless moralising about official failings, we are required to believe these two things at once: that decent, honourable individuals who suffer rational anxiety about genocide in Gaza, or an overheating planet, or the degradation of our cities, will also brag about using coke. They are fully aware of how it ravages lives, devastates families and terrorises communities and societies. Fully aware of how soaring demand contributes to the vast wealth of drug cartels, unfathomable levels of corruption and violence in transit countries such as South America and Africa and environmental destruction of places such as the Andean region caused by coca cultivation.
Cocaine use is not a private business. The seven years to 2024 saw a 252 per cent rise in numbers seeking treatment for cocaine alone. Cocaine was the second most common drug overall in 2022, according to the Health Research Board, and was involved in one in three drug poisoning deaths that year. Between 2013 and 2022 cocaine poisoning deaths increased by 259 per cent, the largest increase of any drug group.
The collateral damage to society includes more than 2,500 incidents of drug-related intimidation recorded here since 2021. That’s nearly two a day and is probably a gross underestimate. Many of us know of at least one family which has been forced by violent threats into paying a relative’s drug debt, often with huge amounts of “interest”.
The reported incidents include 50 drug-related arson attacks, a fourfold increase since 2022. They included a woman who was sprayed with an accelerant and set on fire as she opened the door to her home in Clondalkin, Dublin. They may have included the burning to death of a four-year-old child, Tadhg Farrell, and his 60-year-old grandaunt Mary Holt, after her house in Edenderry, Co Offaly, was petrol-bombed in an attack potentially linked to a criminal gang operating in the region. None of the victims had any involvement in crime. The town has suffered several violent eruptions linked to drugs. People in small towns tend to know what’s happening, but they can’t be blamed for staying silent. The deeper question is for the recreational users who knew all about the little boy who was burned to death and who blithely ordered their Christmas “bump” off the handy menu anyway, using young teenagers corrupted as couriers.
Despite a significant increase in arrests in recent years, only 4 per cent of cases were prosecuted. And we think Trump is the problem.
