Pressure on Cork and Limerick drug czars must continue

ONE of the country’s most senior Garda officers says the force must keep up the pressure on heroin dealers in Cork and Limerick, otherwise the drug will blight those areas in the years ahead.

Assistant commissioner Ray McAndrew, who is due to retire today, said he saw how heroin ravaged Dublin’s inner city when he worked with the Crime Task Force there in the 1980s.

When he was promoted to chief superintendent in February 1996 and arrived in Cork, he was pleasantly surprised to see the drug hadn’t taken a foothold, either there or in Limerick.