The Kettle's Boyled: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
Masked gangs are arriving at rural homes at night and demanding sums of up to ten thousand euro from families who had no idea their adult children were partying on drugs.
There was lots of media comment last week about an article in a farming newspaper on the subject of farm families and drugs. It was reported that masked gangs were targeting the families of rural dwellers to collect drug debts. These gangs had found it even more profitable to extort money from the parents of drug users than from merely selling drugs. And some farmers were forced to sell cattle to pay debts incurred by young family members. The local cocaine habit was coming home to roost.
I have often referenced this issue in these pages, as have many other commentators. The notion that drug dealing and the downstream crime that funds that sordid trade is something that happens in cities is a myth. Every town and village in Ireland has a criminal who sells drugs, and you can get cocaine delivered to your comfortable home quicker than a bag of fast food.
The article instanced masked gangs arriving at rural homes at night and demanding sums of up to ten thousand euro from families who had no idea their adult children were partying on drugs, on credit from people they would normally never associate with. It must be a sobering and life-changing experience for these families, learning that if your children lie down with dogs, the whole family is liable to get up with fleas.
It is predictable that this scourge is only now getting attention because families are being forced to sell cattle. But this problem has existed for years, it didn’t suddenly arrive in rural Ireland last week. The real victims, the people who are murdered and maimed as part of the process that gets the bag of cocaine to the door of some farmer’s son or daughter, never get a mention, and they’re not getting a mention now. Their lives are not seen as being as important as the shame of having to sell stock to sort out a mess at the end of the supply chain.
Three years ago I wrote a column about the death of Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia. Travelling in a small plane with her four children to escape them being enslaved by drug processors in Colombia, the plane crashed in the jungle. She lived for four days and the four children, aged between one and thirteen then wandered in the jungle for a month before stumbling into a village.
Farm families may suffer a bit of embarrassment because one of their children is an idiot, but at least they just have to go to the mart to sort it out, and not to the cemetery.
