Getaway - Part 7

I arrived home after that first Thailand trip to the Dublin drizzle flat broke and completely unable to even pretend that I was happy to be there. I was twenty-three and back in my Ma’s house in Ballybrack with no job. And I didn’t want one either. It would be at least six months before the type of bullshit menial dogsbody number I was likely to get would pay enough for me to get back to Noy. That was not a fucking an option. I’d have topped myself by then.

The days ticked past and in depressed, befuddled desperation, I started to give serious thought to doing a jump over at a post office or a shop. Unfortunately, my entire hold-up knowledge-base came from watching Robert De Niro in Heat on one occasion, and jail time was the kind of mammoth leap backwards I really didn’t need. The other slightly less risky option was to deal. I’d dabbled in selling hash in college so I wasn’t a total newbee, but I no longer had ready access to a large pool of people in their late teens that lived to get stoned. This meant that if I wanted to start dealing I would have to ply my trade locally – and this carried an altogether more sinister set of risks.

Ballybrack was the type of decrepit, spirit-crushing housing estate that tends to spread like ringworm around modern industrial cities. It would normally be fertile ground for a drug dealer, but it had one odd difference that made it anything but. IRA men fleeing war-torn Northern Ireland in fear of arrest or assassination during the troubles could settle in the south and fight extradition back to the North; often successfully. There were IRA cells operating across the Republic, but for some reason, the paramilitary refugees who opted for Dublin tended to concentrate in Ballybrack. Whole extended families were shipped down with the structures, lifestyle and attitudes forged in ultra-violent Belfast all still firmly in place. Poverty and degredation spawned the usual antipathy to authority and created a community the police struggled penetrate, but this wasn’t good news for would be dealers. The IRA wasn’t going to see generations of potential recruits in one of its key Dublin outposts fall victim to drugs, so it policed the area itself. People who were caught dealing were told to stop. If they didn’t, they were dragged from their beds and shot in the knees. If they did it again it was two in the back of the head.

The years passed and the Good Friday Agreement held out the prospect of peace, but the olive branch was slapped away by Ballybrack’s hardliners. The main families joined the ranks of the dissidents and pressed ahead with the armed campaign in the forlorn hope that force of arms would bring about a British withdrawal. By day some of the key players, many of whom I had known practically all my life, would sit in a conspiratorial huddle in a perpetually dark corner of my local.

By the time I flew back from Thailand after my first trip the shaven-headed thirty-somethings were on the back foot. Garda Special Branch had just raided a training camp on a farm at the edge of the Dublin mountains. They seized a dozen AK47s and a fucking grenade launcher. They also arrested five men, three of whom were from Ballybrack. One of them lived on my street.

I’d sometimes stop off in the local for a swift scoop on my way back from the dole office and they’d be sitting there. You’d send over a customary smile, and get one in return, but the air would hang with their desperation. But although they were very much the dying wasp, they could still give you a fucking nasty sting. They were still armed, they still had control of the area and they were still regularly shooting drug dealers. So that was out.

Around the one month mark, with me still getting a dole cheque I spent on drink and the phone cards I called Noy with, the dissidents proved they were not a totally spent force. They fire bombed a series of commercial premises around Belfast that the news said had cost the British exchequer five million quid. Closer to home, a security van robbery had taken place just outside Dublin city centre and according to the grapevine the Ballybrack cell was responsible. The mad fuckers welded a sharpened metal girder onto the back of a flat-back truck and reversed it full tilt into the side of a Securicor van. It popped like a grape and the robbers pulled out the cash and got away. Four hundred grand man. These fuckers had four hundred fucking grand.

To be continued
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