Less than two years ago in September, 2019, Holland was shocked when Derk Wiersum, a 44-year-old father of two, was shot dead in front of his wife outside their home in Amsterdam. 

Wiersum was the lawyer for a crown witness, Nabil B, who had turned supergrass in a case against two of the Netherlands’ most wanted suspects.

That daylight murder led Jan Struijs, chairman of the biggest Dutch police union to concede: “We definitely have the characteristics of a narco-state. Sure we’re not Mexico. 

"We don’t have 14,400 murders. But if you look at the infrastructure, the big money earned by organised crime, the parallel economy. Yes, we have a narco-state.”

The death of Dutch crime reporter Peter R De Vries (64) on Thursday, a week after he was shot in Amsterdam by drug criminals, confirms that warning in a most disturbing way.

That the chief suspect has been linked with Irish criminals and the tremendous scale of this week’s seizure, must ring alarm bells here too as they suggest we are not too far behind Holland’s descent into something really dark and ugly.