Lifeboat crews recall a day ‘that will go down in folklore’

IT WAS the image that flashed around the world — a lifeboat crew fishing bales of cocaine from mountainous seas in a remote west Cork bay.

As they responded to their pagers that morning last summer little did two of the country’s busiest lifeboat crews realise that they were about to be thrust into the centre of the biggest drugs seizure in the history of the state.

Some would go on to give crucial evidence in the state’s biggest ever drugs trial.