When Dublin Airport opened 85 years ago, the original terminal building was intended to cater for 100,000 passengers a year.
Now that’s how many pass through the place on a daily basis, and more than 15,000 people work at the airport and adjoining businesses.
The equivalent of a village when it opened, it is a bustling town now – and that requires policing.
About 40 uniformed members of An Garda Síochána and 10 to 15 detectives are based at the station a few metres from Terminal One.
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It’s Tuesday morning when The Irish Times visits and two members of the force, Debbie Burnett and Peter Mullins, are about to go out on patrol.
There is already somebody in the cells after €19,000-worth of cannabis was found earlier in a suitcase. But the list of possibilities for their day on one of the country’s more remarkable beats is long. Neither of the two officers knows what to expect, they say, other than that it’s likely to be busy.
In the normal course of events, there are airport-related versions of all the most obvious crimes: thefts, public order offences and so on.
But drugs feature more in the workload at the airport than in the average Garda station.
Bullets in backpacks are an almost regular occurrence and, the statistics show, there is even the occasional kidnapping.
“It’s a different world,” says Supt Darren McCarthy, who has had responsibility for policing the airport as part of his wider brief in Ballymun, the north Dublin area near the airport, since February 2022.
Much of the job, he says, inevitably involves meetings, administration and protocols, but his fondness for the operations the place throws up is still obvious.
Over his time in the job, he had to plan and oversee visits by all sorts of VIPs, from foreign presidents to football teams.
Burnett and Mullins talk about the peculiar mix of air-rage incidents, mental health supports and theft tourism – a phenomenon that involves individuals or gangs flying in from London or farther afield, stealing small but expensive items such as perfume and sunglasses from the airport shops, then boarding a flight back out.
“Sometimes we get word in advance that they’re coming, we’re waiting at the gate to say ‘hello’,” says Mullins. “We had one recently where they were wearing sunglasses they’d stolen on the previous trip over.”
It works both ways, though, says Burnett.
“You might get someone here buying the cheapest flight they can, for €15 or whatever, fleecing the airport shops, then just going home again without ever getting on a plane,” she says.
Cases of theft at the airport more than doubled between 2004 and 2024, from 253 to 540. Offences involving controlled drugs almost trebled to 81 and there was a fivefold increase in public order offences, to 241.
Detection rates are relatively high, he says, and there are some particular success stories, such as the tackling of a series of high-end car thefts from the car parks last year.
Some of it, says McCarthy, is down to better engagement between the various stakeholders in the airport and reporting, some to a more proactive approach by the force itself.
“Much of it is just a reflection of what’s going on in society generally,” he says. “Almost all of the public order-type incidents we are called to on planes involve alcohol or drugs, usually cocaine, but then cocaine is across society.”
Burnett and Mullins both transferred to the airport after long stints in city centre stations because they live locally, have families and wanted to skip the daily commute.
“I loved the community policing work,” says Burnett, who was previously based at the Bridewell, then Store Street in Dublin city centre. “But it was two hours of my day, travelling.”
Mullins was based in Kevin Street, also in the city centre, but lives close enough now to literally run to and from work, which he does.
The days can bring almost anything, Burnett says as we walk a Terminal One concourse of departure gates, our movement punctuated by passengers seeking directions.
The destinations of flights from this part of the airport tend to include a couple of holiday hotspots associated with drink-fuelled incidents.
She recalls an incident of romance fraud involving a woman who travelled from the United States intending to meet a man who she had not yet grasped had defrauded her.
“Her family got in touch and we were at the gate to meet her. We stood back for a while in case he did show up, which would have been brilliant, but when he wasn’t, we went over. She was very vulnerable and so we got her a hotel and helped her get back on a flight the next day to her family,” she says.
Football and other big events can make things busy, but McCarthy points out that the 2024 Europa League final attracted 14,000 fans on charter flights but involved just one arrest – “an Italian who got worked up because he couldn’t open the toilet door on the plane”.
People flying back from funerals can be a source of trouble as often as those who have travelled for football, Burnett says.
Many ostensibly serious incidents end up amounting to little or nothing, with calls to deal with weapons usually involving women with pepper spray or men who hunt and have unwittingly left bullets in backpacks.
“The items are confiscated but there aren’t prosecutions involved,” says McCarthy.
More common are opportunistic thefts of watches or phones from people who have taken them off to pass through the security machines.
Mental health cases are a daily occurrence too, with a steady stream of homeless people attracted by the shelter and access to basic amenities. “You try to do you best for them,” says Burnett.
She says they are helped to make calls and seek alternatives, but she makes it clear that allowing them to stay is “not an option”.
Movement between the different areas of the airport and out around the planes comes with strict rules for the gardaí, as well as for airport police – staff employed by airport operator DAA have aviation security responsibilities but far fewer powers – and all of the other staff. Security is pervasive across the campus, though, with more than 1,500 cameras monitored by a DAA team.
“If you are in town following up on an incident, it can take days to track down CCTV footage,” says Mullins, who recalls one investigation where he had to call into one shop after another in an effort to piece together footage of a chase.
“Here, you just fill out a piece a paper; it’s all there.”
Often, members of the public chip in by taking footage of their own with phones.
Mullins mentions an incident in which a man threw about barrels from outside a bar, causing thousands of euro in damage. When footage of the incident was reviewed, almost everyone else pictured was filming it themselves.
In the airport, Burnett says, violent encounters are very rare, with drugs more commonly at the heart of the most serious crime. We are now in Terminal 2, where American flights come in, a quieter area for the gardaí, and Mullins jokes about getting 25,000 steps a day in the job.
Some €35 million-worth of drugs was seized from passengers by Customs and gardaí over the past 2½ years, says McCarthy. Brazil, Lisbon and Doha are some of the recurring origins of flights involved in drug seizures.
Many involve the drugs being swallowed. Gardaí have spent up to 10 days with the smugglers in hospital rooms, waiting for the drugs to be passed.
“You still get the odd old-school one where they come in with packages taped to their tummy,” says Burnett, sounding somewhat bemused.
“Those people are often vulnerable too,” says McCarthy.
“[They can be] very poor, with drug debts themselves, or sometimes terminally ill. They tell us they’ve been paid a couple of grand and then they all get convicted because it’s an easy one to get a conviction on ... the average sentence is eight years.”
At the other extreme of the spectrum, McCarthy deals with the security arrangements for visiting heads of state.
We drive past the area where these planes are parked in one of the station’s patrol cars. McCarthy says he sometimes has to persuade embassies that they don’t need to have their own armed personnel guarding planes in the designated area where they sit for the duration of their time in Ireland.
Burnett and Mullins are more focused on how cold it is to be stationed in this part of the airport, close to the runway and overlooked by the control tower but exposed to the elements.
“It’s a nice place to work, though,” says Burnett.
