It is fascinating to see the familiar story of Dublin’s 1980s heroin epidemic told through a fresh lens. That is what UK documentarian Benedict Sanderson does with Dublin Narcos (Sky Documentaries, Saturday), which finds a new perspective on what will be a well-worn tale to many Irish viewers.
The first of three episodes focuses on the rise and fall of Larry Dunne, a career criminal who, in the late 1970s, flooded the capital’s inner city with heroin. We meet Paul Tracey, a gentle soul and aspiring musician washed away in that first wave of addiction: he describes taking heroin as “falling back into a punk fluffy cloud” that left him “in a blissful state”.
Sanderson also introduces us to the “Mockeys”, a covert squad of undercover gardaí whose number included future Garda commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan. As with the other members of the squad, she had to go deep undercover. “I shaved my head, dyed it different colours,” she says. Someone needs to turn this into a eight-episode prestige drama.
As with his previous series, Liverpool Narcos, Sanderson fleshes out the action using dramatic recreation. We see Dunne and an assistant grill a drugs mule who arrives one packet of heroin short. His tone turns from jovial to chilling and, just like that, she finds the missing drugs.
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He also tracks down Larry Dunne’s brother, Christy Dunne Jr, who shares war-stories with relish. “I hit him right in the jaw and knocked him off the f**king bench,” he says of one notorious run-in with a judge
Dublin Narcos is pacy and, if it doesn’t glamorise Dunne, neither does it go out of its way to demolish the mythology around Ireland’s first narco kingpin. That said, Sanderson avoids the excitable “cops and robbers” tone that has characterises much Irish reportage about the drugs trade. The portrait he paints lacks the tabloid parochialism that has attended much of the writing in Ireland about crime. At no point does it feel you’ve tripped head-first into a Sunday World splash.
The film doubles as a profile of a country verging on a failed state. In the 1980s, the Provisional IRA waged war on Ireland both as a sovereign nation and as an economy – and Sanderson shows us how terrorists and their political apologists were quick to infiltrate the antidealer movements in the inner city. These grassroots movements became sprinkled in Semtex, it is suggested.
But there was also a heart of darkness crouched within society itself. The Dunnes had gone to Daingean industrial school, where they were abused by “sadistic and psychopathic” teachers. Dublin Narcos doesn’t make excuses for their criminality. Still, even before heroin, it is clear that Ireland was grim and hopeless.
When he was finally put away, Dunne notoriously warned the authorities that the criminals that would follow would be far worse. That story is to be told in future episodes. In part one Dublin Narcos shows how and why heroin got a death grip on the city.
“We had a lot of disenfranchised youth. High unemployment,” says Paul Tracey, who would contract HIV from a dirty needle. “We took to heroin like a duck to water.”
