‘Everybody is affected in a different way’: Drogheda aims to put drugs feud behind it

The words “Belonging”, “Hope”, “Courage” and “Mastery” are in large, hard-to-miss letters on flower boxes either side of the Red Door Project in Drogheda.

With its front door painted fire engine red, the centre supports people with addiction issues. The words on the flower boxes outside were certainly not automatically associated with the town when it was in the grip of a criminal feud.

The drugs feud, which began in 2018, left many residents in fear when going about their daily lives. Now, five years on, headlines about shootings, petrol bombs and drug-related intimidation have dramatically reduced. However, the community impacted by the feud and all that came with it is still recovering.

There has been significant investment to aid this recovery on foot of recommendations in a 2021 report from the former director of the Probation Service, Vivian Geiran. He had been commissioned by Minister for Justice Helen McEntee to look at what needed to be done in response to rising concerns regarding crime, and specifically drug-related crime, as well as feuding between organised crime groups in Drogheda. The criminality reached a particularly horrific low point with the abduction and murder of local teenager Keane Mulready-Woods in January 2020.

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Apart from significant additional funding being given to the Red Door Project’s addiction services, a new Apprenticeship Training Centre, the first of its kind in the country, will open shortly; there is a new choices project for early school leavers, a prison links worker has been appointed and there will be a new tertiary education facility at Drogheda Institute of Further Education.

[ Drogheda feud timeline: main events so far ]

Education is also supported at primary level with the allocation of extra teachers to three primary schools. The schools have had first-hand experience of children falling asleep because they had not slept at night due to the feud.

Michael Keogh, who is an independent voluntary chair appointed by the Department of Justice to oversee implementation of the report’s findings, said children from Moneymore (housing estate) “were afraid to go out on Halloween in case bangers were guns going off”.

Louise Mahony, general manager of the Red Door Project, said: “Parents were afraid to put them into their pyjamas in case they had to get them up in the night; there was [Garda] armed response outside Moneymore for months and months.”

In recent times though, the atmosphere and messaging around Drogheda, the largest town in the country, has changed, according to Gráinne Berrill, co-ordinator of the board set up to implement the recommendations of Geiran’s Drogheda: Creating a Bridge to a Better Future.

[ A feud in Drogheda: ‘The violence has been building for years’ ]

Mr Keogh agreed: “I think Drogheda is a safe place already and it will be safer.”

The report’s recommendations fell into two main areas: the need for improved inter-agency co-operation in the administration and delivery of services in Drogheda and the need to resource services or provide additional services in the area.

“If you look at who has made the biggest difference in making Drogheda a safer place, it’s the gardaí because they got the resources,” added Mr Keogh.

Ms Berrill said the Garda’s Operation Stratus, which commenced in 2018, took “the heat out of the drug feud and was taking the key people out of the picture”, while Ms Mahony said gardaí “had the manpower to enforce the curfews [imposed by the courts] and they did it relentlessly”.

While community safety is about more than just policing, she said, “The investment in policing is the key foundation to all of the work that’s happening in terms of the report and the plan.”

“The gardaí are very much a part of not only the structures of the board but the work that everybody is doing together and it’s very much that ‘collective working’ piece.”

Ms Mahony said they are also an intrinsic part of the “trauma response”. Trauma that she said had been experienced by the community at large including due to the “absolutely horrendous things that have happened in our town to a child” – a reference to the murder of 17-year-old Mulready-Woods.

“We’re all a part of that, we all live here, we all work here, we all have children here. Everybody is affected in a different way, whether it’s the fact that tourists don’t want to come here any more or that your friends don’t want to send their children to your house any more ... what I’m saying is that has changed [and] the guards were part of the response to all of that.”

In one of the videos prepared to accompany the recently published progress report on the plan’s implementation, Chief Supt Alan McGovern said Drogheda-focused Operation Stratus targeted organised crime and led to the detection of nearly 1,000 drugs incidents, taking more than €6 million worth of drugs off the streets. It detected and dismantled organised crime gangs, seized firearms, ammunition and pipe bombs. More than 500 people are before the courts for drugs-related offences and 18 money laundering prosecutions have begun.

He said investment in the community policing team had allowed them to contribute to enhancing the lives of the people of Drogheda and build trust and decrease fear among the community. The Community Policing Team was recently described at national level as a benchmark for community policing nationally, he added.

One of those who has availed of Red Door services is Oliver*. He was aged 14 when he started “messing about with drugs and that quickly escalated”.

Within two years he was taking 50 benzos (benzodiazepine) a day along with cocaine, MDMA and cannabis. That went on for three years.

“Drugs were everywhere, it was normalised, I didn’t really see it as a problem,” he said.

Looking back, he was “just trying to fit in. I just thought it was a laugh, that I was having the craic with the boys ... there was nothing else to do, you know.”

At 16, he had his first seizure.

Asked how many a day he took, he said, “as many as you could get your hands on; 40, 50 a day”. That was on top of “whatever would be around, like the coke, the MDMA ... I couldn’t go without them, I didn’t care, I was six or seven stone.”

By then he was committing crimes to feed his habit and had appeared as a juvenile before the courts.

At age 19, he also had drug-induced psychosis. “I got tired of my life the way it was. I was on my death bed, that [sort of] life just wasn’t for me any more. It was only a matter of time before something bad happened, an overdose or something.”

Having got clean, he is now, at 21, described as a role model to others at Red Door of what life with recovery is like.

Of the future, he said: “I don’t know fully what I want to do yet but I know I can do anything I want, there is nothing holding me down. Nothing is stopping me.”

Asked what the Red Door has given him, he said, “a new life”.

It’s one the whole community now aspires to, as they put past troubles behind them.

*Name has been changed