The New Irish Craic

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Ireland Calling with John Spain

The New Irish Craic

December 6, 2007

by John Spain

A LOT of people who are not Irish and have never been to Ireland have heard of the craic, that unique mixture of a few pints and mad conversation that we’re famous for.

It kind of defines who we are, that ability to drop everything and take off for a few hours or even for a whole weekend, fuelled by alcohol and wit. But the craic here has changed.

Unfortunately there’s a new ingredient in a lot of the craic in Ireland these days and there’s nothing Irish about it.

Very often these days the animated conversation and wild behavior has nothing to do with our traditional talent for amusing ourselves, and more to do with cocaine.

It’s everywhere here now. It’s rarely spoken about, of course, but cocaine use has now permeated all levels of Irish society.

And it is that aspect of the cocaine plague that pushed it into the limelight here for the past few weeks, following the publication of a new book about cocaine use in Ireland called The High Society by an unknown author called Justine Delaney Wilson.

One section of the book will be of particular interest to those of you who fly regularly between Ireland and the U.S. Among the many people the author interviewed for the book is an unnamed pilot in his forties who flies out of Dublin to various airports in the U.S., at least a couple of times a week.

She quotes the pilot as follows: “I actually use coke more on the days that I am working and away than I do when I’m at home. I find sitting still in the confined space of the cockpit for hours excruciating without it.

“The truth is that aircraft largely fly themselves these days, and when we land I tend to sit in front of the box (TV) by myself, doing coke, having a few drinks in a motel room and waiting for the morning.”

That should make you sit up a bit the next time you hit a little turbulence on the way over.

But that was far from the most controversial part of Delaney Wilson’s book. There was also an interview with an unnamed government minister which the author says was done in a hotel just across the road from the Dail (Parliament).

“Yes I do drugs — just coke though — regularly enough,” the minister said. “I’m certainly not the only one around here that does. The hypocrisy that surrounds it really galls me. We all know how widespread it is — in bars, offices, over there (motioning across the road to the Dail), but we pretend to be horrified when we read the figures in the papers.”

As well as the unnamed minister and pilot, the book also had interviews with a priest, a nun, a lawyer, a doctor, business people, a top media columnist, and a lot of other people from all kinds of professions and parts of the country, all of whom admitted to regular cocaine abuse.

All of the people interviewed for the book were anonymous, but intriguing little details about each interview subject were added to give an idea of who or what they might be.

If it had been just a book, it might not have attracted too much attention. But the book was also used as the basis for a two-part television documentary tie-in with RTE, the national TV station.

The two-part program was made by a small independent production company for RTE. Actors played the parts of the various people in the book as the interviews were recreated for television.

When this was broadcast a couple of weeks ago it sparked a furious national debate, with acres of space given to it in newspapers and questions asked in the Dail about the identity of the government minister. A sort of national guessing game — Name the Minister — began as people speculated about who it might be.

What was really driving all this, apart from the fun of trying to guess who was who in the book, was the fact that this was a drugs story which was not about the track suit wearing “skangers” from the deprived housing estates, but was about the “nice” people, respectable, educated, well-off. The subtitle of the book is Drugs and the Irish Middle Class.

But what followed then took a rather different turn. It became a game of shoot the messenger, as other journalists began to question the methodology and credibility of the author, Delaney Wilson.

Had she really spoken to all these people? Would a minister really have been so forthcoming? Would a pilot be stupid enough to say such things, especially since the number who fly the Atlantic from Ireland is relatively small? Did she make it up or sex it up?

Even allowing for the jealousy of some journalists who resented Delaney Wilson’s coup, there were worrying aspects to her, to the book and the TV programs.

If the book had been the work of a seasoned writer with a track record it might have been easier to swallow. But Delaney Wilson was an ingénue who had risen without trace through a succession of jobs on small magazines and production jobs in small independent television companies. No one seemed to remember her, and those who did had not been very impressed.

And even though the book had come from one of Ireland’s most serious and prestigious publishing houses, Gill & Macmillan, the absence of any evidence to back up the veracity of what was in it was concerning. All of the interviews were one on one, with no witnesses to offer confirmation.

Delaney Wilson had given the publisher what she said were contemporaneous notes of the interviews, and these were locked in the publisher’s offices. But she subsequently revealed that she had also taped the minister’s interview.

Then, as the heat from some newspapers intensified, she revealed that she had destroyed the tape because she no longer felt certain that she could protect it, perhaps from a court order.

This was all news to the publisher, who said that the development had damaged her credibility, although they were still standing over the book. Delaney Wilson claimed to have destroyed the recording and the transcript of it on the advice of her own lawyer.

To add to the cloak and dagger atmosphere, the author then flew off to New Zealand, the home of her husband, on a family holiday. The furor continued in her absence, with high-powered investigations being carried out by RTE (still ongoing) and a Dail committee saying it will want answers from RTE executives. Delaney Wilson will be back in Ireland this week to answer questions.

That may not help much, of course, because she is unlikely to reveal her sources. The bigger question is whether RTE should be running such a major documentary (really a so-called mockumentary) with no real way of establishing the accuracy of the claims being made.

It’s all very sensational and shocking and makes great TV, but since the veracity had not been established in advance is it really what the national broadcaster should be doing? Should RTE be relying so much on the publisher of a book instead of doing its own fact checking?

The publisher is saying that they know the identity of the minister and that they are happy that the book is based on real interviews and is accurate. But other groups are less happy.

The airline industry and the pilots’ association say the author must reveal the identity of the pilot because passenger safety is at stake. The Irish Aviation Authority has written to RTE demanding the pilot’s name.

Other groups are also unhappy, teachers and lawyers being just two. The book features a teacher who likes to take a line during her free classes, and a lawyer whose offices Delaney Wilson was in with a drug dealer when he made a drop and picked up a bag of cash. Again there have been demands that she proves that this is real and suggestions that if she can’t, no one should believe her.

The very idea that an established drug dealer would allow her to accompany him on his cocaine drop-off rounds of leading offices in Dublin is a bit far fetched. “Nothing is illegal when a hundred businessmen decide to do it,” Frank (drug dealer to a Dublin law firm) tells her.

So how much of all this should we believe? As a former features editor on two national newspapers, I have dealt with this kind of situation a number of times.

For example, it would not be unusual when doing a feature on, say, prostitution to include an anonymous interview with a “working” girl. But this has to be done carefully and with caution by a writer with experience.

Unfortunately Delaney Wilson’s lack of much of a track record does not inspire confidence. Even so, my gut instinct is that the interviews in the book are real, although we don’t know how accurate or fair her transcription of them is, or how much mixing and matching she has done to hide her sources and suit her story.

Much more important than Delaney Wilson or her book, however, is the real situation we face here because of cocaine. We didn’t need her book to tell us the extent of it and the lurid recreations in the TV programs didn’t help either because they were too hammy to have real conviction. The real situation does not need any melodrama to make it shocking.

Last week a group of young adults gathered in a house in Waterford for a late night birthday party after being in pubs in the city earlier. When someone produced cocaine it was too damp to snort, so some of the partygoers ate it.

The problem with this is that it takes at least an hour to kick in, and people are inclined to take more when they get impatient. With alcohol it produces a toxic mixture.

Within a few hours two young men were having seizures and palpitations, before lapsing into a coma. And on Tuesday afternoon, one of them died.

As I write, the most high profile model in Ireland, Katy French, is critical in hospital, having collapsed at a party last weekend.

French has admitted to taking cocaine in the past and what has happened to her looks very much like a cocaine overdose.

Another reality of drugs in Irelan d is the fact that last July cocaine with a street value of *100 million was seized off the Cork coast as it was being smuggled ashore. It was discovered by accident when a boat involved got into difficulty, raising the question of how much was going undetected.

The answer is probably a great deal. We have a very long coastline around the south and south west of Ireland full of hidden bays and beaches, and only eight navy patrol boats to monitor it. The area is around a quarter of a million square miles.

With other routes into Europe being closed off, the drug smugglers now regard Ireland as an easy entry point, with the added advantage that onward shipment in containers is not subjected to the same scrutiny as cargoes coming from places like West Africa.

Most of it goes straight through to the U.K. and Europe. But it also means there is plenty to drop off for the home market.

Cocaine here has never been so cheap and so easy to source. Medical evidence suggests that one in 10 Irish people have used it. The real number may be a lot higher.

And it has reached into all parts of our society. It’s great craic altogether.

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