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DoChara's Ireland Blog
Random Writings about Ireland and the Irish
Monday
July 9 2007
There came a ship.......
I wasn't a very good student of Irish but I always loved the poetry and am surprised at how much of it has stayed in my memory. Every now and then something happens that brings forgotten lines to mind, and this week it was the chance event that led to customs official hauling cocaine from the waters of West Cork by the bale.
Those white things are 3ft x 2ft bales of high purity cocaine.
They fished out 61 bales of this extraordinary catch so far,
but reckon there may be around 40 more unaccounted for.
There was a time when boats coming to Irish shores from far off South America brought dreams of foreign places, of a better, fuller, more colourful life far from the dreary grey skies of Ireland. They certainly did for Pádraig de Brún, who wrote one of my favourite Irish poems, Valparaiso. The first verse goes (with an approximate English translation):
Tháinig long ó Valparaiso
Scaoileadh téad a seol sa chuan;
Chuir a hainm dom i gcuimhne
Ríocht na gréine, tír na mbua.
There came a ship from Valparaiso,
Dropping her sails in the bay,
Her name evoking sun filled kingdoms,
lands of conquest far away.
This ship brought not echoes of romance or exotic lands but an incredible cargo of misery conjuring up visions of drug wars, killing, greed, corruption and destroyed lives.
Most of the massively growing number of middle class people in the UK and Ireland for whom cocaine is now the trendy drug of choice, will go out of their way to make sure they buy Fair Trade coffee, wouldn't even consider buying ivory and eat only dolphin-friendly tuna.
The exploitation of poor coffee farmers by huge multinationals, the decimation of Africa's Elephants and the and killing of dolphins by fishermen are injustices that must never be supported. All very laudable, but the killing, exploitation and criminality that the cocaine trade supports and allows to florish is given no more than a passing thought.
It's a strange mindset. I hope this discovery puts the lousy market into some degree of disarray, though I doubt it will. It was pure luck that this lot was intercepted and only a fool would believe that many similar cargoes have not passed the same way unnoticed before.
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