A pensioner farmer prevented three armed plain-clothes members of a Garda drugs unit from gaining access to his home because he thought they were “thugs in hoodies”.

A senior garda told a court yesterday that a number of residents “were in fear of their lives” over the staging of an unofficial boy-racer rally in Clare last year.

An undercover garda who posed as a boy-racer at a late night car rally said that if one of the cars performing ‘doughnuts’ had spun out of control, "it would have resulted in carnage".