‘We’re seeing firearms, arson, attacks on homes’: The families in the eye of Ireland’s cocaine storm

With use in the country soaring among both young and older people, it is not just the drug that is devastating lives but the violence and abuse that surround it, writes Annie Kelly

Cocaine use in Ireland has soared in recent years, as record amounts of the drug flood through Europe’s porous borders from South America.

Patrick Murphy remembers very clearly the first time he took cocaine. “I was 19, and that first line, I just fell in love with it,” he says. 

“The confidence it gave me, it was like nothing else. It was just so easy to keep taking it because it was everywhere. Even now, sitting here, I could get a bag in my hand in 10 minutes, faster than ordering a taxi.”