Teenager weaned off drugs was ‘held down and injected by thugs when he refused to buy from them’

A teenager who had been weaned off drugs through treatment for his addiction was held to the ground and injected by a “gang of thugs” when he later refused to buy drugs from them, the Dáil has heard.

Fianna Fáil TD Cathal Crowe said the young person, who was not yet 18, “had gone through the whole addiction services”.

The Clare TD said that “when someone is treated for drug addiction they remove themselves from the sales market. A client is gone, a sales base is gone”.

When the teenager returned to his home environment “the very people who were trying to sell him drugs for a long time reappeared again”.

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“In this particular instance the person on several occasions had refused to buy the drugs that they had been weaned off during their treatment period,” Mr Crowe said.

He said “they were eventually held to the ground and injected by a gang of thugs”.

The TD said there are “fantastic therapy services out there, but there seems to be a bit of a drop off when they leave that support network and when they return to their home environment”.

He called for more support for young people leaving addiction treatment services.

Mr Crowe was speaking during a debate on youth diversion programmes to prevent young people from getting involved in crime.

Sinn Féin’s Martin Kenny expressed concern about perceived inappropriate uses of youth diversion programmes in serious criminal cases.

The Sligo-Leitrim TD highlighted an incident in his constituency where a young girl was seriously sexually assaulted and “a number of young men who were juveniles at the time were clearly identified” for that assault.

But “they were diverted into the youth diversion programme”, which he said was extremely upsetting for that girl and her family.

These young men engaged in a serious sexual assault, he said, and “in the eyes of the victim were let off scot free”.

Mr Kenny said “we cannot have a situation where it’s used inappropriately or wrongly and I think that comes down to proper governance and regulation”, and it needed to be reviewed.

Social Democrats TD Aidan Farrelly, a former youth worker, said he could “personally guarantee that if every community had a professional youth project or a youth justice project, we would see the outcomes for a generation of young people change overnight”.

The Kildare North TD said “a study done many years ago put an economic cost on that where for every €1 we invested in young people’s lives in different services, it saved the State multiples of that in the long run”.

Minister of State Niall Collins, who has responsibility for youth justice, said that when the 2001 Children Act was introduced 30,000 children were committing crimes each year.

“By 2016, that had reduced to 10,000 approximately. This decline has continued. In 2023, the most recent year for which official figures are available, the figure was 7,843.”

He said funding for youth justice services has increased from €18 million in 2020 to just over €36 million in Budget 2025.

A youth diversion project evaluation by his department showed that “young people who engage with youth diversion projects were less involved in criminal or antisocial behaviour, and had improved self-confidence and communication skills, increased happiness and an overall improved sense of hope”.

Mr Collins said two new youth diversion applications in east Clare and north Tipperary had been commissioned. “When these projects are up and running before the end of the year, we will have achieved full nationwide coverage in our youth diversion programme,” he said.