Going Rate — John Brady

Ireland's Hundred Thousand Welcomes continues to draw waves of immigrants and refugees to its still-roaring 'Celtic Tiger' economy. In Dublin's teeming streets, every second person seems to be Polish. For those hundreds of thousands of Poles - Catholic, hard-working, white and like the Irish, survivors of an overbearing neighbour - Ireland works. But the Tiger devours too, and barely a week in Ireland, 20 year old Tadeusz Klos lies in a coma on the rainswept streets of Ireland's capital. He will not survive. This beating death is a new low, a tipping point. Gang violence and brazen shootings have already made Dublin's streets a battleground this last decade. This year gang on gang murders have escalated. Now, with outrage in the press in Poland and Ireland, the Gardai - Ireland's police - must come up with answers. Violent crime in Dublin is out of control, editorials declare. Can a team of Guards from a city station really do the job? And should the fabled specialist Murder Squad really have been disbanded three years ago? Minogue is suddenly in demand, both for his background in that Murder Squad and for his current work in the Garda International Liaison office. 'Whatever you need' Minogue is told, but his arrival is resented in the local city Garda station. With little to go on, Minogue first forms a picture of a chance event, with bad timing, a swarm of drunken youths and racism. And Tadeusz Klos was no angel: this wayward and restless only child was involved in petty crime back in Poland. Ready or not, Minogue is about to drop down a crevasse into Dublin's underworld. There, not far from the busy world-class shopping and the crowded nightclubs, the glass clad offices tower and the massive rock concerts, is where drug lords and their hired killers rule.