Europe can’t stop the tide of cocaine

On a naval base on Haulbowline Island, south-east of Cork, officers stationed inside a screen-filled room keep watch over a vast stretch of the Atlantic Ocean that has become a front line in Europe’s war against drugs.

"It’s needle-in-the-haystack stuff," says the commander directing Ireland’s navy fleet operations, who asks not to be named. Part of his job is to spot anomalies in satellite and other imagery that may indicate small boats increasingly used by drug traffickers.

But even if he sees something worrying, the navy can only deploy “three maximum, and usually two” of Ireland’s eight vessels at a time, he says, due to staff shortages, repairs and the fact that two of the ships are unfit for the rough Atlantic waters. “We’re policing a million square kilometres,” he adds. “To be anywhere comfortable, I need at least 12 vessels.”

In the battle for the seas, drug traffickers are often coming out on top — making Europe, in the words of the UN, the new “primary destination” for cocaine.