As news of Daniel Kinahan’s arrest in Dubai went around the world, the antennae of scriptwriters must have gone into overdrive. 

The global cartel responsible for flooding Europe with cocaine has featured in several documentaries and its leader is a figure of endless fascination. 

It can only be a matter of time before he gets the full Hollywood treatment.

The makers of gangster movies find it easy to persuade us that ruthless crooks have hearts of gold or some redeeming quality. 

Martin Cahill, admittedly a minnow compared to the Kinahan sharks, was an Ordinary Decent Criminal.

If there’s no Robin Hood deed to mitigate Kinahan’s crimes, the international organised crime player can be cast as a massively charismatic creature to whom only Leonardo DiCaprio can do justice, with George Clooney as Christy Sr.

In the great tradition of the Mafia movie genre, Kinahan will be a suave genius or a criminal mastermind, as well as a violent and unpleasant thug who didn’t give a hoot about who he was harming.

Just another anomaly in the exploitation of drug culture for entertainment, not unlike the pretence in middle-class circles that there’s no link between recreational drug use and crime and social devastation.

In the future Kinahan movie, there’ll be plenty of roles for starlets to play molls who followed the crime lords to Dubai, and until recently enjoyed a fantasy lifestyle in that consumer paradise.

The narrative arc of the Kinahan empire is like a box-ticking exercise for the crime genre, which relies on the seductive power of a rags-to-riches story plus fascination with the dark side of life.

It opens with Daniel’s youth in Oliver Bond flats, bullying local drug pushers before heading an international super-cartel responsible for organising shiploads of cocaine from South America.

Then there’s the fight for legitimacy and respectability, which saw him reinvent himself as a boxing impresario, from selfies with celebrities to coming to Gary Lineker’s attention for brokering the famous fight for Tyson Fury.

But like so many of his ilk, that limelight sealed Daniel’s downfall by drawing focus to his day-to-day life as head of a murderous mob.

And what’s not to like about the family flight to Dubai, to live not as fugitives but as free men with impunity, their glamorous Wags fronting operations, dabbling in real estate and devising a scheme to buy a fleet of Egyptian military aircraft believed to be destined for drug smuggling?

Or the Marbella years, running a gym and a drugs racket, starting a brutal feud with the rival Hutch family that caused the deaths of 18 men?

There was the BBC Panorama investigation and $5million (€4.3m) bounty on Daniel’s head, coupled with US sanctions in 2022, which caused the boxing empire’s collapse.

And finally, the dark underbelly of the Kinahan empire – the communities it enslaved, from the naive youngsters lured into addiction who became dealers to fund their habit, to the babies born strung out to junkie mums.

Live fast, die young was once the mantra of those who embarked on a life of crime simply because they had nothing to lose. Today, it’s the young street dealers who embody it.

Not weekend drug users who rely on their supply chain but are savvy enough to otherwise keep their distance.

And certainly not the Kinahans.

Old certainties may be shifting, but judging by Leo Varadkar’s apology for his blunt comments on the economic hegemony of urban Ireland, the urban/rural divide is still a powerful marker in Irish society.

Granted, not as much as it was in 1926, whose census was just published last weekend to great fanfare. 

This particular chapter in the Story Of Us painted two distinct pictures of early 20th century Ireland.

The first is of small-holdings and bigger farmsteads, where the households were usually large and relied wholly on agriculture.

The second picture is of towns and cities comprising shops, boarding houses and residential streets occupied by families working as clerks, labouring as salespeople or engaged in the professions, and more often than not employing a domestic servant or two.

As I tapped my grandparents’ names into the search field, I thought of the many thousands of young women, often teenagers just out of school, who made their way from the countryside to a new life in the Big Smoke.

On the forms, it was clear that maids often hailed from the same birthplace as the head of the household or his wife.

Local ties presumably would have been considered a guarantee of kindness towards the hired help. But loneliness and hard work in return for food, lodgings and meagre pay must have been just as prevalent.

How long did the girls typically stay in service? How did they find husbands or friends? Did they become part of the family or were they kept at arm’s length?

The census, with its wealth of facts and information, is a connection to the past.

Exactly what kind of past, though, is left to the imagination.

FBI director Kash Patel’s drinking has come under scrutiny following reports that his security team struggled to rouse him when he appeared intoxicated and that agents needed special equipment to open his room when they had no luck trying to wake him up. 

Patel has launched a lawsuit against the Atlantic magazine for publishing the claims. Perhaps he should leave well enough alone. 

For many right-minded people, reckless intoxication would be a reasonable enough response to working in the Trump administration. 

Unlikely though it may appear, it might even cause the loathsome Patel to go up in their estimation.