FROM THE ARCHIVES:The "Emergency" years of the second World War were a boom time for smugglers on the Border and for many years afterwards as wartime rationing and shortages continued. An anonymous reporter toured the area to compile this report on the most profitable commodities. – JOE JOYCE
A POWERFUL car, old, travel-stained and inconspicuous, but with a perfectly tuned engine, capable of speeds up to 90 m.p.h, dashes along an unapproved road over the Border into Northern Ireland during darkness. It stops at a shop or house, where its arrival is expected, and two tons of butter or sugar, or 100,000 cigarettes are taken from it and hidden away. Within a matter of minutes the car is driven off, and yet another smuggling trip has been completed successfully.
Hundreds of these trips are made each week along the whole length of the Border from Newry to Derry. Apart from the small scale traffic carried on by day trippers, the type and volume of smuggling into the North is determined by the profit to be made.
At present, the three main lines are butter, sugar and cigarettes. Northern Ireland housewives are held strictly to the butter ration of 2 ozs. per week, and this is so inadequate that they are glad to buy more on the black market at 6s. 6d. per lb. The controlled price was raised this week to 3s. A smuggler who brings in two tons has a nice profit, even though he buys it at 3s. 10d.
Customs officials along the border believe that a number of Southern creameries reserve [a] good deal of their butter for Northern smugglers, who are regular customers. Such sales never go through their books, of course. These creameries, in the knowledge that the smugglers cannot complain, can extort higher profits for themselves by charging 3d. per lb. on top of the regular price.
Sugar is an even better proposition. It costs 6½d. per lb. in the Republic, and a smuggler who buys it by the ton may even get a discount.
If he gets it safely into the North, it is so scarce there that he has no difficulty in selling it at up to 3s. or 3s. 6d. per lb. Ice-cream manufacturers, for instance, are glad to get it at the price. Sugar is being smuggled not in tons, but in hundreds of tons, each week. Big cars can carry a ton of sugar easily, and lorries have been caught with up to 10 tons on board.
Fewer cigarettes are being seized now than a year ago, and opinion is divided as to whether this is due to the rise in prices as a result of Mr. [Sean] MacEntee’s Budget, or to more elaborate and successful tactics by the smugglers.
Before cigarette prices went up, a smuggler had a profit of almost 2s. on a packet of 20, but now it is half that amount, and to maintain profits he has to handle twice the quantity. One car can carry up to 100,000 cigarettes, and the only certain thing about the traffic is that hundreds of thousands are involved every week.
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