When Dublin Airport opened 85 years ago, the original terminal building was intended to cater for 100,000 passengers a year.

Now that’s how many pass through the place on a daily basis, and more than 15,000 people work at the airport and adjoining businesses.

The equivalent of a village when it opened, it is a bustling town now – and that requires policing.

About 40 uniformed members of An Garda Síochána and 10 to 15 detectives are based at the station a few metres from Terminal One.

It’s Tuesday morning when The Irish Times visits and two members of the force, Debbie Burnett and Peter Mullins, are about to go out on patrol.

There is already somebody in the cells after €19,000-worth of cannabis was found earlier in a suitcase. But the list of possibilities for their day on one of the country’s more remarkable beats is long. Neither of the two officers knows what to expect, they say, other than that it’s likely to be busy.

In the normal course of events, there are airport-related versions of all the most obvious crimes: thefts, public order offences and so on.

But drugs feature more in the workload at the airport than in the average Garda station.

Bullets in backpacks are an almost regular occurrence and, the statistics show, there is even the occasional kidnapping.

[ Passenger at Dublin Airport imported cocaine by swallowing 90 pellets of drug, court hear