Newstalk's Henry McKean spent the day with Customs at Dublin Airport to hear about the work they do.
With passenger numbers slowly getting back to normal, Revenue officers are now once again dealing with a very busy airport environment.
Smuggling didn't stop during the pandemic - over the last year, officers have confiscated 6 million cigarettes and 800 kilos of drugs (including 105 kilos of cannabis and 10 kilos of cocaine).
Weapons, large swords and a police baton were among the other items seized.
Brenda Hearn, head of Customs Enforcement Operations at Dublin Airport, told Henry it's often a case of "behavioural detection" when trying to spot someone who may be attempting to smuggle items through.
She said: “When you’re watching the hall all day and people move around… you then start to see the person who is maybe hanging back a little bit or just behaving a bit oddly.
“Some of the really professional ones are really, really difficult to detect coming through.”
Once officers stop somebody, there’s a number of questions they ask in a bid to find out why someone is here and how they paid for their trip.
Ms Hearn explained: “You’ll have people making very expensive journeys who have no money whatsoever and no idea why they’re here… a lot of times, they have no idea where they even are.
“You have to remember these people are just the mules - a lot of times it’s borne out of complete and absolute desperation.
“We had one last Friday, which was 60 pellets of cocaine, which is just under a kilo of cocaine, swallowed.
“They were arrested on Friday and taken to hospital, where they expelled the drugs.”
There have been tragic cases internationally where the drug pellets someone had swallowed in a bid to smuggle them through customs burst and the person subsequently died.
Ms Hearn observed: “We had one case a few years ago where a chap had swallowed liquid cocaine and it was leaking. He was in a very precarious situation.
“Our duty of care is always to them - our concern is their health, first and foremost.”
You can listen back to Henry's full report for Moncrieff below:
