When Michael O’Sullivan was a young police officer in Dublin during the height of the Troubles, he struggled to be taken seriously when he said he wanted to work on catching heroin traffickers.
Michael decided to take matters into his own hands while rising through the ranks of the Garda Siochana in the 1980s, just as his hometown was experiencing its first heroin crisis.
In the new three-part series Dublin Narcos, the now-retired cop recalls what occurred thereafter, helping to convey the narrative of how the emergence of heroin, ecstasy, and cocaine altered the city from the 1980s forward.
At the age of 24, Michael felt dissatisfied with the force’s inability to address the issue and decided to launch the first undercover Gardai.
The only difficulty was that he had no licence to do so.
‘I had this burning desire and the police seemed to completely have their hands tied,’ he told Metro.co.uk.
‘The police weren’t having any successes and their practices were outdated, and it takes a lot for systems to change, but I could see the gap.
‘I assumed they would say yes, but they shut it down.’
But Michael didn’t let that stop him, and he decided to persist.
‘It got to a stage, after a number of successes, when my special branch bosses warned me to “not go chasing drug dealers”.’
‘We are in the special branch and are in the business of intelligence’ he was told.
He was also advised by one boss: ‘I don’t care how much drugs there are, don’t go or we will have a problem.’
But as Michael said: ‘Not only did we do it anyway, we thought they wouldn’t know.’
The next time they tested the waters, the team of young officers ended up managing to arrest one of the city’s biggest names, Micky Dunne, whose family were infamously credited for bringing heroin into Dublin.
‘I didn’t think at all that operation would be a success, but it worked out, and it got so much coverage in the media the next day,’ he said.
When he turned up for work after that weekend bust, Michael was in hot water.
‘I was hoping my inspector didn’t read it but on Monday I came in and of course he had read it…and he put me on office duties for two months,’ he shared.
‘It was usually one month if you’d done something wrong, so I was really, really penalised that time.’
Despite that early setback, the undercover drug police, dubbed “mockeys,” rose from strength to strength.
Over the course of two years, they made well over half of the hundred narcotics busts in Dublin’s hardest criminal area, the C District, by posing as addicts to catch sellers in the act.
While the continuing Troubles across the nation made procuring resources exceedingly difficult, the mockeys were finally approved because, as Michael put it, ‘the results were flowing in’.
‘They reluctantly accepted they had to bring us in formally to the drug squad,’ he added.
Nonetheless, danger was never far away, with cops being stabbed with needles while making arrests, being robbed and having money taken, and in some cases, suffering lasting injuries.
‘I thought I was invincible…[but] I still have a lot of injuries and still some scars. It was fight or flight,’ he explained.
‘What compounded the problem is that AIDS was rampant at the time, so you had to regularly do blood tests,’ he added.
In one particularly brutal attack, an officer was smashed in the head with a hammer and ended up needing to be operated on.
‘While that was an extreme example, injuries and hospitalisations were commonplace,’ he said.
Actually tracking down the seemingly never ending web of dealers left them going in circles at times too.
‘All of a sudden heroin was everywhere and it was a whole new phenomenon both for the health service and the police…it was a huge network,’ he said.
‘We would catch a dealer and then realise he was getting his supply from someone else, but then they had someone above them who also had multiple dealers themselves…it was like a huge graph and a spiders web.’
As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s and ecstasy became more popular, Michael, who was now a more senior member of the Drugs Squad, was responsible for a series of successful raids on ecstasy-infested venues.
He was in charge of a fresh generation of undercover officers at the time.
Michael later left the force and went on to command the EU’s anti-drug smuggling agency, MAOC-N, before retiring.
Michael, the main character that takes the audience through the three episodes of Dublin Narcos, said he leaped at the chance to participate.
As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s and ecstasy became more popular, Michael, who was now a more senior member of the Drugs Squad, was responsible for a series of successful raids on ecstasy-infested venues.
He was in charge of a fresh generation of undercover officers at the time.
Michael later left the force and went on to command the EU’s anti-drug smuggling agency, MAOC-N, before retiring.
Michael, the main character that takes the audience through the three episodes of Dublin Narcos, said he leaped at the chance to participate.
‘This speaks of the social history of the city and shows the challenges that we faced as young police officers and the job and dangers they still have to face, which can go unrecognised,’ he said.
‘Equally because it was a good story and I think it is important for today’s policeman to go back and see how it was back then.’
Dublin Narcos also features first hand testimony from the kingpins, journalists, dealers and users who were all connected to the story of the rise in addiction, violence and organised crime in the Irish capital.
Dublin Narcos is now streaming on and NOW.
