Drug intimidation has become more lucrative for dealers than selling the drugs themselves, the Dáil has heard.
Social Democrats justice spokesman Gary Gannon said more than 2,500 drug intimidation incidents have been reported since 2021 but just 4 per cent resulted in prosecutions.
He said teenagers are being used to distribute drugs across the country and that at any one time up to 1,000 vulnerable children across the State are under the coercive control of criminal adults.
Tánaiste Simon Harris agreed the soliciting of children in this way was “particularly disgusting and heinous”.
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Harris pointed out that while this often occurred in the most deprived communities, the drug use is “happening in so-called middle-class areas, middle Ireland, where people are snorting a line of coke at the weekend, not thinking of the devastating consequences it’s having on communities”.
“Nearly all communities are complicit”, he said, adding there had to be an understanding in society that taking illegal drugs “is not a victimless crime” and “somewhere along that chain there is a child drawn into a life of crime”.
There must be a “less tolerant approach to the casual use of drugs”, he said.
Raising the issue during Dáil Leaders’ Questions, the Social Democrats TD asked whether the Tánaiste could tell families in Ballymun, north Dublin, they were “secure from crime” in the wake of the incident this week where an 11-year-old child picked up a loaded gun that been discarded during a Garda Siochána chase and fired a shot into the air.
“It is by the grace of God that this child, or no other child in the vicinity, was killed,” Gannon said.
Highlighting the issue of drugs intimidation, he said more than 2,500 incidents of drug-related intimidation had been recorded in the past five years.
“Arson attacks linked to drug debt have quadrupled in four years. Debt is sold between gangs so that families who pay once are forced to pay again.”
He said the Farmers’ Journal reported in March some farmers had to sell cattle because of family members’ drug debts.
The Dublin Central TD said a garda sergeant told a community meeting in Galway “families across rural Ireland are being targeted to pay off the drug debts of their children”.
The crime prevention officer added “drug intimidation has become more lucrative for dealers than selling the drugs themselves”.
Gannon said multiple reports had all found that teenagers “are being used to distribute drugs the length and the breadth of this country”.
“Criminal networks in Ireland deliberately and systematically recruit children below the age of criminal responsibility” and “the conditions of their birth make them vulnerable to exploitation”.
“Poverty is the one consistent factor in the grooming of children into crime.”
Challenging Fine Gael on its stance as the “law-and-order party” he said it could not “avert your gaze from the factors that have led to the children being exploited in this State, being groomed into the most exploitative forms of criminality”.
The Tánaiste acknowledged the “huge sense of trauma and fear, disgust, shock that has been felt” in Ballymun over the incident, believed to be part of an ongoing feud.
Two men were subsequently arrested and Harris said: “That is law and order”. When an alleged crime is carried out “people should be detained, arrested, questioned”, he said.
Harris said the law had been changed in relation to children being coerced into crime and the Government was looking at further “concrete steps that we can take on the issue”.
