For as long there has been a border on the island of Ireland, smugglers have exploited the lawless roads stretching from the South Armagh to North Louth region in the east, all the way to the Fermanagh frontier with Donegal in the Irish Republic in the west.
But smuggling in the region has evolved from a localised phenomenon to an international business that stretches from the hills, fields and back rural roads of the Irish borderlands to England, Europe and the far east. Alan McQuillan, a veteran Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) senior officer who became the last head of the UK’s Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) said the Troubles and the Provisional IRA’s South Armagh Brigade “industrialised” smuggling.
McQuillan recalled that by the time he arrived in Crossmaglen’s heavily fortified and repeatedly attacked police station in 1982 the IRA’s South Armagh outfit was already running a highly sophisticated series of smuggling operations.
“I remember going into a house and in one of the rooms there were hundreds of boxes of washing powder from the floor to the ceiling. At the time, the Irish Republic, which is only a short distance south, was suffering a major recession and the Dublin government had to create emergency “luxury taxes” on goods including washing powder overnight.
“And almost overnight the smugglers of South Armagh, under the control of the IRA, started bulk-buying cheaper washing powder in Northern Ireland and smuggled it across the border where it went on sale at a cheaper price than the official price in the south’s shops. They were making about £1 for every box they sold in the Republic and it netted them a fortune during that ‘luxury tax’ period,” he said.
Until the advent of people smuggling, however, the most lucrative racket for the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade and the smugglers who worked around them was the sale of cheaper but illegal “washed” diesel – agricultural or home heating oil that was treated with chemicals to change from green to red and sold on for vehicles.
The former head of crime in the old RUC, retired Assistant Chief Constable Raymond White,began to study the financing of terrorism and crime while at the FBI’s training college in 1983. Like McQuillan, White has seen the exponential growth of the South Armagh/North Louth smuggling cult from what was once a “war chest” to fund the IRA’s armed campaign into a “‘privatised’ international business enterprise that has recruited even some of the Provisionals’ former loyalist enemies into the trade.
“Something fascinating happened after the IRA ceasefires of the mid- to late 1990s. The smugglers under their control were producing so much illegal diesel oil that there was a glut of it, which the internal Irish underground market could not absorb.
“So, the same people who were helping to bomb England during the Troubles started to smuggle over diesel to hauliers across the Irish Sea at low prices free from tariffs and taxes. These connections that were forged in the mid- to late 1990s helped build up a network in England and those contacts were then used in the trade in human beings,” White said.
McQuillan said the rewards to be reaped from the people tradewere enormous. “We broke one smuggling operation in 2005 which was run from the back of a Chinese restaurant in central London. Basically, you had one clerk managing over 1,000 bank accounts dispersed across the UK, which were filled with the money the people being trafficked were paying to come from China to the UK. In that single operation alone, and don’t forget this was 15 years ago, the ARA found that it generated around £300m which this guy was transferring into the accounts of Snakehead gangsters over in Shanghai,” McQuillan said.
Another by-product of the globalisation of smuggling along the Irish border has been the sight of former enemies from the Troubles colluding with each other to amass fortunes out of the misery of others. Co-operation and collusion between some loyalists in the criminal underworld and their one-time deadly enemies in the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade is now commonplace.
The driver of the lorry in which the bodies of 39 men, women and teenagers were found in Grays, Essex, last year was Maurice “Mo” Robinson. He has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of the Vietnamese migrants and had been promised £60,000 for this one smuggling operation that went so tragically wrong. Unlike the other defendants in the case, Robinson comes from an Ulster loyalist community in a Protestant redoubt of North Armagh. The majority of the others convicted are Catholics and nationalists from South Armagh and the Irish border counties and its historic links to republican-led smuggling rackets along the frontier.
While the smuggling cult is now a “privatised” apolitical multimillion pound business, the human cost of the people-trafficking side of it continues to anger men like McQuillan.
Referring to the Vietnamese victims left to suffocate in a refrigerated lorry in Essex, McQuillan reflected: “They treated these people as they still treat others like them just like bags of onions to be moved from place to another.”