Man given ten years over €440m drug find

A 24-year-old Englishman has been sentenced to ten years in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year to being involved in the country’s biggest ever cocaine smuggling operation when some €440 million worth of the drugs was recovered from the sea off west Cork.

Gerard Hagan from Hollowcroft, Liverpool pleaded guilty last May when he was arraigned at Cork Circuit Criminal Court to possessing the huge haul of drugs for sale or supply at Dunlough Bay Mizen Head on July 2nd 2007.

Sentencing him today Judge Sean O Donnabhain said his case had to be distingushed from the other men who stood trial in connection with the drug seizure because of his guilty plea and the fact that he had not engaged in "blatantly cynical perjury" of his co-accused.

Earlier this year Judge O'Donnabhain presided over the trial of three other Englishmen, Martin Wanden, Perry Wharrie and Joe Daly who all denied similar charges of possesing the drugs for sale or supply.

However all three were convicted by the jury and Judge O Donnabhain sentenced both Wanden of no fixed abode and Wharrie, of Pyrles Lane, Loughton, Essex to 30 years in jail while he jailed Daly, of Carrisbrook Ave, Bexley, Kent for 25 years.

During the eight-week trial, the court heard how Hagan had travelled across the Atlantic from Barbados with two Lithuanians aboard the catamaran, Lucky Daywhich was carrying a cargo of some 1.5 million tonnes of cocaine for collection off the Irish coast

The Lucky Dayrendezvoused with a rigid inflatable boat (rib) 30 miles off the West Cork coast and the drugs, contained in some 62 parcels, were transferred on to the rib but the boat stalled when a gang member inadvertently put diesel in its petrol engine and it was carried into Dunlough Bay.

The rib capsized in heavy swells in the remote cove and both the drugs and Hagan and Wanden were pitched into the sea with Hagan managing to make it ashore and climb up a steep cliff face before calling to the home of a local farmer, Michael O'Donovan.

Mr O'Donovan told the court how Hagan was reluctant to have him call the emergency services after he told him that his boat was after crashing on rocks in Dunlough Bay and that there was possibly another man still in the sea.

Mr O'Donovan ignored Hagan's attempts to play down the incident and contacted the coastguard thereby setting in train a sequence of events which led to customs and gardai making the largest ever seizure of drugs in the history of the state.

Hagan, who was travelling on a false passport under the name, Gerard O'Leary, was arrested later that day by gardai and has been in custody for the past 15 months since he was first charged with the offence within days of making his away ashore from Dunlough Bay.