Witness Joey O'Callaghan writes: ‘We can stop teens being groomed into crime’

I bought a new jacket and shoes to meet James Browne, who is a Minister of State at the Department of Justice, because I wanted to look my best and show respect for him; after all, he had reached out to me wanting to hear first-hand how kids are groomed into crime gangs.

The minister is in the process of moving new legislation through the Dáil and on through the Seanad so it will become a criminal offence for people to groom children into a life of crime.

He explained to me that the legislation purposely keeps the bar low for the offence, so that Gardaí can act early and not wait until a child is handed a gun or is asked to do something very serious.

They want the legislation to be useful to prevent kids getting sucked in to criminal gangs too far so it’s not too late to help them out. They also want the legislation, which will carry a five-year sentence, to be easy-to-use and, therefore, useful.

Minister Browne is young and he asked me about my own lived experience as a person who was groomed as a child. He listened intently as I told him how a simple job on a milk round had turned into a living nightmare for me, which culminated when I gave evidence in court against Brian Kenny and his sidekick Thomas Hinchon for the murder of Jonathan O’Reilly outside Cloverhill Prison.

“Why did you do that,” he asked me. “Why did you give evidence against them? It wasn’t easy for you and had a huge effect on your life since.”

Of all the questions I am ever asked that one is the simplest one I can answer. And the reason is because it was the right thing to do, that for me there is never an excuse for murder or to take someone’s life. It is totally outside my moral code that a human being should take another’s life and celebrate it.

I told Minister Browne about how I ended up as a witness. And it all started when I was the victim of grooming. At the age of 12, I was drawn into a life a crime by the heroin dealer and murderer Kenny, who was then masquerading as an honest milkman in my neighbourhood of Blanchardstown.

I was a vulnerable child at that point, struggling to fit in to a new school, with an alcoholic father and a mother who was working every hour of the day to keep us with food and shelter.

I’d a good teacher, who I know now tried to intervene, worried that I was about to fall through the cracks in the education system, but despite his efforts I was deemed a troublesome student who often went on the hop.

What my school did not know at the time was that those days I was absent I had been picked up by Kenny and set to work selling heroin on the landings of Ballymun towers and was being fed a diet of cocaine.

Within a very short space of time it seemed that my future had been mapped out for me by a dark and very violent man who removed me from my family, my school and everything I knew and who turned me into a drug dealer and a robber.

The grooming process was clever and when I look back now I can see how Kenny created a world of secrets between me and him, how he praised me and terrified me all at once and how he ultimately used threats and intimidation against me and my family to lock me into his world.

I feel very passionate about the fact that there are children out there today feeling as trapped and as frightened as I once did and who feel they have nobody they can talk to about their situation and so get deeper and deeper into that world.

But there is hope and there are people like me with that lived experience who perhaps know how to talk to those children or who can identify ways that we can all show them a different path and a way out.

I hope to meet with Minister for Education Norma Foley in the coming months and I would urge the Government to go a step further with his very welcome legislation and to set up a task force to identify ways that we can be proactive about grooming in communities.

When you hear the officers from the Criminal Assets Bureau talking, they always say that one of their main successes is having an anonymous way that people can give information and that they can follow up without expecting someone to stand in court and give evidence.

This is a vital tool that could be used when it comes to grooming children, a tip line where members of the community can report their concerns and where information can be followed up discreetly.

A multi-agency approach needs to be put together to help these children, personnel in the hospital system, in education and in all sorts of other jobs should be trained to see the signs and to reach out to the children. I always say if a kid says they are okay, just ask again and again and again because maybe they aren’t.

It’s important for us to show those kids on the street corners with a deal in their pockets that there are alternatives to working in a drug gang; that life is full of opportunities and there is a far brighter future outside of crime. We need a special outreach and support centre for kids to go, where they can feel safe and where they can talk to adults who understand what is happening to them.

I’d like to think that this is the beginning of something really big for kids and that we have an opportunity to acknowledge and identify that many young criminals are there because they have been groomed by older, dangerous individuals, who have maybe at one point been groomed themselves.

We need to break the cycle and have strong support structures where kids feel safe. If I am prepared to do what I can to make a change and I know there are many, many more out there like me who can help too.