Gardai in Dublin's two main city centre stations have carried out hundreds of arrests in the past month as part of a campaign to round up drug dealers attracted into the centre by the 18 drug-treatment centres located there.

'Operation Stilts', which has shifted hundreds of dealers from city-centre locations towards the inner suburb areas, was instigated after Dublin Lord Mayor Gerry Breen issued a call for the relocation of the drug-treatment centres which, he said, were magnets for addicts.

Thousands of addicts have been teeming into the centre to buy and sell drugs. Since last autumn the supply of heroin into Europe has been severely disrupted and much of the dealing has been in synthetic heroin tablets smuggled her in large quantities, mainly from China.