Cocaine had a 75% purity and had a street value of €1.2bn

THE cocaine pulled out of the sea off the coast of west Cork could have netted well in excess of €1 billion on the street.

The purity of the 1,500 kilos of the drug was 75%. The total street value given in the trial was €440 million. This was calculated on the basis of reducing it down to a percentage purity of between 18% and 19%. However, the average purity on the street is 6.7%.

In other words, had the value of the cocaine been calculated on the basis of average purity on the street, the actual street value would have been in the region of €1.28bn.

To get a sense of the physical bulk and weight of one of the 62 bales, think in terms of it being 2½ times the size of the largest domestic sack of potatoes commonly sold in supermarkets — or 25 bags of sugar.

When Detective Sergeant Fergal Foley cut open the first bale of cocaine in a room at Schull Garda Station he had to open a white hession-type cloth bag with carrier handles. Inside this were several layers of black plastic, not unlike bin bags.

The bale then gave way to 25 individual slabs individually vacuum-packed in a five millimetre black rubber coating. It is believed that one of the functions of this rubber was to make each bale buoyant.

Inside the rubber coating the slab or brick was wrapped in a dirty yellow orange coloured plastic and inside this was a vacuum-packed clear plastic.

Each bare brick was so compressed that it would need to be milled or broken down into powder and then mixed with mixing agent. The bricks are often broken down with something like a food-blender.

Each brick was embossed with the logo of the Columbian manufacturers of the illegal drug — two arrows running parallel and pointing in opposite directions, between which were three stars.

The bales of cocaine recovered from the sea on July 2, 2007, were brought to Bantry Garda Station and stored under 24-hour armed security until July 4 when they were transferred to Garda national headquarters in Dublin.

No quantity of the actual cocaine was ever brought to court to be made an exhibit in the case.