According to workers who deal with drug users and affected communities, young children are being groomed to be drug mules in Ireland's towns and cities.
RTÉ’s Prime Time aired undercover footage over the course of several weeks of minors selling drugs in Dublin's City Centre. They revealed that the young kids would travel by e-scooter to congregate together to sell drugs to others.
After viewing the footage, criminologist Trina O’Connor said that "it's very troubling, particularly the age of them, because many of these young people are being groomed into serious criminality."
Prime Time also spoke to now teenagers who were groomed to be drug dealers when they were a child. ‘Jonathan’ told the investiagtive show that he was a drug mule and dealer for years. "When you see a child with a backpack at 9am. You would assume the child is in a uniform walking down the road to school. Instead, that child has two kilogrammes of cocaine in their backpack, and they're on the way to deliver it. No one will ever look at a child as a drug dealer or as a courier," he said.
"People as young as seven or eight, people in third or fourth class, [are] going around with a backpack full of drugs, scales, paraphernalia or something. It’s ludicrous," he continued.
'Jonathan' explained that seeing his mother take drugs when he was a kid turned him off ever taking them, however, he thought the "money aspect of it was enticing."
"I'd be looking at this drug, and I'd be saying to myself, ‘I could make an awful lot of money off this. I could have a new bike, new clothes. I can go out to a restaurant, I could do this, or I could pay someone to do that.’ You know, a couple hundred euro at that age, you feel like you're a millionaire," he said.
Jonathan explained that a child could be asked to drop a bag off to a house or a car and be offered €100-€150. After the child becomes known and trusted they are then asked to help weigh and cut up drugs. When the drugs are prepared, he said that minors are sent out to sell them.
Michael Guerin, an addiction counsellor said that it tends to be young people who have grown up in a disadvantaged area that end up in these situations. "It tends to be young people who emanate from areas of social and economic disadvantage, where the distribution of illegal drugs is commonplace. And it's almost a rite of passage because it's an opportunity for 14 and 15-year-old young men to make money that they otherwise wouldn't have," he said.
Guerin warns that drug gangs see children as dispensible parts of the drug trade. "There is such a complicated hierarchical structure within the drug distribution network that if these people get detected, they are basically foot soldiers. They're dispensable. They do not care about them, and they'll be replaced with the next one that comes along," he said.
