Organised cri-me in Ireland flourished in the Noughties but, unlike the economy, it seems impervious to recession. The country's major criminals who made their fortunes from drugs also expanded into new territory, including prostitution, which has boomed this past decade, and forged alliances with eastern European and Chinese crime organisations involved in human trafficking.

A major feature of the evolution in crime in Ireland at the start of the 21st Century has been the completion of the move by former IRA and other republican terror groups into full-time organised crime.

From "fighting" the scourge of heroin in Dublin under the banner of Concerned Parents Against Drugs in the early 1980s, the city's IRA moved to accepting "protection" money from the gangs in the 1990s and, in this decade, directly into drug trafficking along with a variety of other criminal endeavours.

It was the very public drift into serious crime by the IRA in Dublin that contributed to the sudden decline in Sinn Fein's fortunes in working-class areas of the city in the last two elections.

One of its worst acts was the murder of an entirely innocent and hard-working young man, Joseph Rafferty, 29, who was shot dead as he left his apartment in Ongar, in the west of the city, on April 12, 2005.

Sinn Fein squirmed and denied any link to the IRA but it was immediately known in the south inner-city -- where Joseph's family lived -- who carried out the murder and why. Joseph had "disrespected" a local IRA boss. In fact, he had spurned the advances of the IRA boss's female partner, a woman in her 40s, who had then directed the coterie around the IRA man to target Joseph.

No one was ever charged with Joseph's murder but detectives from the same division did achieve a conviction in a very similar IRA execution the same month. The other victim, James Curran, 42, had publicly challenged a local IRA boss, Bernard Dempsey, after seeing Dempsey accept an envelope containing cash from a local drugs gang. On the evening of April 3, 2005, Dempsey walked into the Green Lizard pub in the Liberties and shot James in front of about 20 witnesses. The murder shocked the local community and witnesses came forward. Dempsey was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006.

The Dublin IRA murders followed the horrific slaying of Belfast man Robert McCartney, a case which attracted international attention when his sisters embarked on their crusade for justice, ultimately never achieved. Together with the campaign by Esther Uzell, Joseph Rafferty's sister, the true reputation of the IRA was finally laid bare.

These murders, and the IRA's descent into organised criminality, were among the main motivating factors for the organisation's Northern leadership to finally announce its disbandment in July the same year, ironically allowing the entry of its political wing into constitutional politics and government in the North.

While Martin McGuinness was taking up his post at Stormont, the IRA in Dublin and the Border area were making their final moves into full-time criminality. The south Armagh IRA, along with the "dissidents" in the Border areas, moved into cigarette smuggling, fuel laundering and other forms of illicit trade on a scale never before experienced. The seizure in October this year of the largest ever haul of smuggled cigarettes in Europe is testimony to the scale of these groups' operations. Interpol and intelligence agencies around the world are monitoring illicit trade originating in the rolling countryside of north Louth, east Monaghan and south Armagh.

The Border Provos' former associates in Dublin wasted little time in getting fully into bed with the major drug dealers who were ostensibly the target of their righteous ire in the 1980s. A haul of 27kg of heroin and 21.5kg of cocaine, with a street value of around €10m -- seized by Belgian police in September 2006 -- was being smuggled here by a gang involving several former and quite well-known Provisional IRA members from south inner Dublin. On October 16 last, a former boxer and well-known 'republican' from Ballyfermot, John Kinsella, 39, was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for his part in the operation.

Kinsella worked with one of the country's biggest drug cartels based in the west of Dublin and with astounding links around the world.

West Dublin criminals have been detected as far abroad as Pakistan directly sourcing heroin via, it is believed, contacts linked to both al-Qaeda and Afghani warlords -- the main suppliers of the world's heroin market. The flow of heroin into Ireland, gardai say, is on an enormous scale and apparently unstoppable.

A month after the drugs were found on the private jet in Belgium that Kinsella had hired, gardai in Dublin seized an even bigger haul of heroin.

In the 1990s, such large-scale hauls would have precipitated a jump in prices. But drug squad officers in the city reported in the weeks after the hauls that the price of heroin was the same and that supply had remained constant. One commented at the time that the drug must be coming into Ireland "in lorry loads".

The drug that characterised the first half of the decade -- the years of economic boom -- was cocaine.

The Noughties has been a bloody decade in the south inner city, all surrounding its cocaine gangs. It started in the autumn of 2000 when the new gang on the block -- based initially around the Kevin Street garda station area but subsequently referred to as the 'Crumlin-Drimnagh' gang -- kicked off their bloody and massively lucrative career.

In 2000, the gang, still mostly in their teens, received their first big shipments of cocaine. Almost immediately, gardai stumbled upon two members of the gang following a complaint from people at the Holiday Inn on Pearse Street about a non-stop buzzing noise from one of the rooms. Inside, gardai found two young gang members, high as kites, operating three coffee grinders, grinding the hard blocks of pure cocaine into powder to "mix" (dilute) it with glucose powder. A third young man, Declan Gavin, then aged only 20, was arrested by gardai in a corridor but released as he could not be connected with the drugs.

Suspicion later fell on Gavin and, in August 2001, his former close associate, Brian Rattigan, stabbed him to death outside a fast-food bar in Crumlin. This killing precipitated the bloodiest feud in Irish criminal history, claiming 17 lives.

In an ironic book-end to the history of the gang and their feud, Rattigan was finally convicted of Gavin's murder last week.

The bursting of the economic bubble was bad for the cocaine trade but, with what appeared to be remarkable foresight, the inner city gang, along with the other big Dublin crime operations, moved into heroin.

Together with Limerick-based gangs and young Dublin-based Travellers, they began expanding the trade out of the city and into the countryside -- where it has taken grip in every town in Ireland. Heroin, the drug of recession and depressed inner cities in America, has taken hold in a way that has never been witnessed in rural Ireland.

Aside from the boom in the drugs trade during the Noughties, the other boom has been in the sex trade. If there is heroin in every medium-sized county town in Ireland, there are also foreign prostitutes. The scale is astounding, as is the organisation. Thousands of migrant women, many of whom have been brought here by and work for organised gangs, are plying their trade from apartments and rented premises across Ireland. The former 19th and early 20th Century red-light areas of Dublin, between Amiens Street and O'Connell Street, and along Aungier Street to the south of the Liffey, are in operation again with hundreds of women working mainly from rented apartments.

According to sources within the trade, the 'protection' offered to the organisers of the prostitution rackets is supplied by the former IRA and INLA gangs in the city who have developed close working relationships with the foreign gangs. The profits in human trafficking and the sex trade are not quite on a par with drugs but it is still an astoundingly lucrative trade.

During the 1990s, the FBI studied the operations of Chinese traffickers in the United States and estimated that a single girl forced to work as a prostitute for these Triad gangs produced $1m (€697,000) in profit within three years -- at which time she would be freed by the gang. Gardai say, however, that many sex workers -- male and female -- in Dublin and elsewhere are in it because they need the money and are doing so voluntarily.

The common factor in almost all areas of crime during this decade has been, and gardai concur, a seemingly inexorable rise.

The major increase in garda recruitment to achieve a record 14,000-strong force has done nothing to reduce crime. The huge spending programme overseen by former PD justice minister Michael McDowell was launched without any real plan or objective and amounted, senior gardai admit privately, to little more than throwing money at a problem. The policing budget has risen from €1bn to €2bn with no impact on crime, in fact the opposite seems to be the case.

There has been no expansion of the prison system and although more than 11,000 people are being sentenced by the courts each year, there are places for only 3,100 -- about the same number there was in the 1980s. It is partly as a result of the awareness that there are no places of detention that judges are largely ignoring the will of the people -- expressed in the 16th Amendment of the Constitution in 1996 -- that a court can refuse bail to a suspect where it is feared they would commit further crime.

Gardai have captured and charged some of the worst criminals in the country but almost all receive bail despite appeals to judges. Last weekend in northwest Dublin, a major criminal figure, on bail facing very serious charges, was involved in an attempted murder.

The decade had opened with the discovery of the bodies of Darren Carey, 19, and Patrick Murray, 20, both shot dead by a brutal west Dublin hoodlum because of a small drug debt. On New Year's morning 2000, he lured them to a quiet lock on the Grand Canal at Kearneystown Bridge and shot them dead, tossing their bodies into the water.

In the following years, the numbers killed by gangs has risen steadily from 12 in 2000 to 20 in 2006, and to 30 deaths this year, the highest on record, including three Dubliners murdered abroad in Spain and Holland.

And while there were changes and expansion in Ireland's crime scene in the opening decade of the millennium, much of its characteristics remain the same. It affects, in the main, working-class areas and the poor.

The Noughties generation, like the south inner Dublin cocaine gang, proved themselves by their ready use of violence and were the first to resort immediately to firearms to settle disputes. They are being followed by a next generation, now in their late teens and early 20s, eager to establish themselves.

When asked by the Sunday Independent what the up- and-coming generation of criminals was like, a senior, very experienced and somewhat battle-weary detective in the city answered: "Worse".

Originally published in