Marcel Roudier had a small business in Surinam, buying and selling food products. It got into trouble and he borrowed €8,000 from local criminals, writes Fintan O'Toole.
When he had difficulty repaying the money, they told him that he could do so by acting as a courier for some drugs. In November 2006 he swallowed 100 pellets of cocaine, took a flight to Amsterdam, and another to Dublin. He was caught.
When Roudier's case came before the Central Criminal Court last November, he pleaded guilty. Judge Desmond Hogan accepted that Roudier was an otherwise law-abiding man who had stupidly allowed himself to be caught up with criminals, that he was "at the lower end of the drugs ladder" and that he had "genuine remorse". But Marcel Roudier, an entirely dispensable cog in the international drugs machine, still got seven years in prison, with the last year suspended.
James Chambers was a "broken-down alcoholic" who was functionally illiterate. He held down a steady job for 11 years, but after his mother's death his drinking spiralled out of control. He left his wife and children and lived on the streets for two years until a kindly landlord gave him a basement flat to live in.
In May 2005 gardaí got a tip-off and raided this flat. They found a kilo of cocaine and 6½ kilos of cannabis. Chambers was storing the drugs for a criminal he was afraid of, who had promised him €2,500. He too pleaded guilty in November. He too had been a model prisoner, "at all times polite and courteous to those in authority", working as a cleaner, getting treatment for his alcoholism. But James Chambers, like Marcel Roudier, got a seven-year sentence.
Let's put these sentences into context. A man fired a sawn-off shotgun twice at a Garda patrol car in Limerick, a crime described by the judge as being "as serious an offence as you could come across". The sentence? Five years.
A man who was part of a mob which attacked a house in Crumlin and beat up "the f***ing Chinese student" who was living there was found guilty of "assault, aggravated burglary, possession of a dangerous implement and violent disorder" in what the judge called a crime "motivated by xenophobia and racism". The owner of the house had to move out of her home of 22 years. The sentence? Five years.
A man who drove a stolen BMW into two motorcyclists, decapitating one and impaling the other on his bike, also got five years. A priest who sexually abused several girls over 25 years got four years.
The clear implication is that we now see even the insignificant small fry of the drugs trade as a worse threat than criminals who shoot at unarmed gardaí, racist mobs, dangerous driving causing death and repeated sexual assaults on children. The seven-year sentences on Roudier and Chambers were the same as that confirmed last month by the Court of Criminal Appeal on a man who twice tried to hire someone to kill his wife. A man who beat three children so badly that one of them had 20 separate injuries got seven years.
It is also typical of the current punishment for rape.
This is not justice, it is hysteria. When a "naïve, stupid and foolish" Cork woman who sat in a car with two others as they collected a consignment of cannabis in Dublin gets the same three years in jail as a man who bit off another man's lip; when a drug courier gets 13 years, as Rashid Shekale did last year - a year longer than the typical murderer - something is askew. And it's not the judges, who in cases like some of those I've outlined have done all they can to mitigate the mandatory punishments. It's a lethal overdose of media attention and political opportunism.
With the belated "discovery" that Ireland is awash with illegal drugs, politicians start to talk tough. The Opposition demands action. The Taoiseach asks: "Why don't gardaí go into house parties where people are using cocaine?" Judges such as Judge James McNulty, speaking in UCC this month, respond by saying that even those caught with illegal drugs for personal use should be sent to jail immediately.
But none of this is going to happen. Gardaí are not going to start raiding dinner parties in Montenotte and Rathgar.
Fellas caught with a few spliffs are not going to be sent to prison.
We know this because we don't have the Garda manpower or the prison spaces to implement these policies, even if they were not daft. So instead we take out our frustration on the stupid, the desperate and the fearful whose fate matters no more to the real drug barons than that of a fly on the windscreen of a pimped-up SUV, and of whom there is an endless supply.
It's a bad business. It undermines the basis of justice by equating those who play small parts in the supply of illegal goods to people who choose to buy them with hideous crimes of violence and abuse.
And it stops us asking why the war on drugs has failed so badly and why we have such an insatiable appetite for illegal highs.