HMS Swift (P243): From Hong Kong to Ireland's Biggest Drug Bust

Built for the Hong Kong Squadron

HMS Swift was built by Hall Russell and Company in Scotland in 1984, one of five Peacock-class coastal patrol vessels purpose-built for the Royal Navy's Hong Kong Squadron, tasked with policing the colony's crowded and demanding waters against smugglers and illegal immigration.

Sold On After Barely Three Years

Like her sister ship HMS Swallow, Swift served only around three years in Hong Kong before being sold, still a comparatively new vessel, to the Irish government, which was looking to modernise its own patrol capability with well-built, relatively young ships.

Commissioned as LE Orla

Purchased in 1988, Swift was delivered to Cork Harbour and formally commissioned into the Irish Naval Service alongside her sister ship on 16 January 1989, taking the name LE Orla, honouring a grand-niece of the legendary Irish High King Brian Boru.

Orla is worth five more words than she gets. Brian Boru is the High King who broke the Norse hold on Ireland and was killed in his tent at Clontarf in 1014 at the moment of winning, which makes him about as close as Irish history comes to a founding legend; naming ships after the women of his family is a deliberate choice by a service that could have named them after admirals and has none. The Irish Naval Service, what it is responsible for and why two second-hand British patrol vessels mattered so much to it, is set out in the article on her sister HMS Swallow (P242), who became LE Ciara on the same day.

The Biggest Drug Seizure in the State's History

LE Orla achieved genuine national significance in July 1993, when she tracked and boarded the 64-foot ketch Brime some eight miles west of Loop Head, Co Clare, recovering two tonnes of cannabis worth an estimated £20 million, at the time the biggest drug seizure in the history of the Irish state. The boarding itself was properly dramatic: in darkness, the Brime's crew tried to ram the approaching Navy Sea Rider inflatables before rushing below to open the sea valves and scuttle their own boat, only to be overpowered in a struggle that lasted just 33 minutes. Four men, a Dutchman, a Belgian, a Dubliner and a Briton, later received sentences of up to sixteen years. The young officer who commanded that boarding, Lieutenant Commander Mark Mellett, was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for it and went on to a rather more senior career still, eventually becoming Vice Admiral and Chief of Staff of the Irish Defence Forces, the first officer from outside the Army ever to hold that post.

Mellett's later career is worth pausing on for what it says about the service. He took a boarding party onto a scuttling boat in the dark in 1993 as a lieutenant commander and ended up, twenty-two years later, as Chief of Staff of the entire Irish Defence Forces, army, air corps and navy together, the first officer from outside the Army ever to hold it. In a service that size the distance between the deck of a patrol vessel and the top of the whole organisation is about four appointments, which is either an argument for small navies or simply what happens when somebody is very good at the job.

Fifteen years later, on 6 and 7 November 2008, Orla again took part in a record-breaking operation, diverted from fisheries protection duties to assist recovery operations at Dunlough Bay near Mizen Head as part of the wider Operation Seabight, a joint Garda, Customs and Naval Service effort that, combined with a separate yacht interception well offshore, uncovered what was then the largest cocaine haul in the history of the Irish state.

Why It Is Always West Cork

Every one of these seizures happens in more or less the same forty miles of coastline, and that is not a coincidence. The south-west corner of Ireland is the first landfall in the European Union for anything crossing the Atlantic from the Caribbean or coming up from West Africa, which makes it the natural place to break a cargo out of an ocean-going yacht and into something small enough to drive away. It is also, from a smuggler's point of view, close to ideal: hundreds of miles of indented coast, deep water close in, dozens of small piers and coves with no lighting and no cameras, a scattered population and, historically, one patrol vessel somewhere in several hundred thousand square kilometres of sea. The Gardai have called it the gateway to Europe, and they were not being rhetorical.

The two record hauls the article mentions were sixteen months apart and are worth separating, because they are frequently run together. On 2 July 2007 a rigid inflatable working a transfer in Dunlough Bay, just round the corner from Mizen Head, capsized in the swell and put sixty-two bales of cocaine into the water; the bales came ashore, one of the crew was found in the sea and later convicted, and the haul was valued at around 440 million euro. Then, between 2 and 12 November 2008, a joint operation code-named Seabight, run with Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency and three other forces, ended with the yacht Dances With Waves boarded 132 miles off Mizen Head carrying cocaine put at something like 500 million euro.

Both figures are street valuations and should be read as such, but the scale is real, and so is the point they make about a very small navy. A yacht boarded 132 miles offshore is not found by luck. She is found because somebody has been watching her for weeks across several countries and because there is a ship available to go out and put people aboard her at the right moment, in the open Atlantic, in November. That is what the Naval Service is for, and in 1993 and again in 2008 the ship that did it was a thirty-year-old patrol vessel built to chase smugglers in Hong Kong.

Retired After Thirty-Five Years

LE Orla was decommissioned on 8 July 2022, and she and her sister ship finally departed Cork Harbour for the last time on 22 April 2024, escorted by Port of Cork pilot boats and tugs on their way to a scrap recycling facility in Belgium, retired due to their age and Ireland's ongoing Naval Service crewing shortages, closing out an unusually long and eventful career that had begun three decades earlier in the waters of Hong Kong.