Niall Donald

So it follows from... I mean, Gerard Hutch's life story is an incredible life story.

And it follows, you know, it matches...

the history of Dublin in a way, doesn't it?

Because it begins in a sort of grinding poverty and it sort of goes through a loss of innocence really for the city in terms of we go, he's born in a time with very little crime or organised crime and he grows up in a time where that starts to escalate and then he becomes a wealthy man during the Celtic Tiger and then we get into the more

a very sinister sort of period of violence and, you know, driven by the profits of cocaine, really.

Did that attract you as well, that kind of telling the tale of the city as well as the tale of the man?

Yeah.

Drones are being used to smuggle drugs, weapons and mobile phones into a Dublin jail on an almost daily basis.

Organised crime groups are using skilled drone pilots to drop contraband items into Wheatfield Prison.

But today I'm speaking to Crime World correspondent Ken Foy, who went inside the jail to see how prison officials are fighting back.

I'm Niall Donald and this is Crime World, a podcast from crimeworld.com.

So we've just seen a video there of a group of prisoners in Wheatfield Prison, one of Ireland's biggest prisons, making a human pyramid to try and get drugs that have been captured in netting.

It's a huge problem, isn't it?

And it's a problem that the Irish Prison Service are determined to address.

So you're talking, you know, we're like more than halfway through the year.

So it's nearly one a day, is it?

Or just slightly less than that?

So drugs being smuggled into prison is an old story, obviously.

The traditional ways were probably still in operation as well.

But the oldest way was people getting temporary release for a day and being smuggling the drugs back in on their property.