The Youngest Person To Enter Ireland's Witness Protection Programme Speaks Out

Joey O'Callaghan was just 11 years old when he was pulled off the streets and plunged into the depths of the criminal underworld.

After being suspended from school, Joey got a job working for local milkman Brian Kenny, collecting money from customers in the area.

But what the young schoolboy didn't know at the time was that he was collecting the debts of drug addicts kept on Kenny's leash.

That first trip on the milk float would lead Joey down a road that would see him give the evidence that would put Kenny behind bars for murder and become the youngest person to ever enter Ireland's witness protection programme.

Speaking to LADbible, Joey, who now has to wear a bulletproof vest wherever he goes, said he just wanted a job to some pocket money, but it didn't take long before he saw Kenny's violent side.

"About a week into moving the milk," he tells me. "We were driving along when another milkman drove past us with a young lad hanging over the side with his arm out.

"Kenny stopped the van and grabbed a hammer from under his seat, and chased after them.

"The next minute, all I could hear was someone's screaming, and their bones cracking and crunching. The other milkman just drove off and left him there."

He added: "Kenny came back to the float, full of blood, all over his face and hands, and clothes. And he said: 'If you ever ever rob from me, that's what will happen to you.'

That boy, Joey later came to find out, was who he had replaced.

After his father died, Kenny forced Joey to leave his mum and come and stay with him, threatening to kill his whole family if he refused.

Joey says he was a prisoner beaten to within an inch of his life and force-fed cocaine to keep him awake and working.

Surrounded by electric fencing, for years Joey ran one of the biggest drug rackets in the country - weighing, bagging, and delivering the heroin, and in charge of all of the money coming in and out.

"One minute he'd be giving me a hug, the next he'd be beating me or abusing me," says Joey, who now suffers from PTSD.

"I was trapped there. I was only allowed out when he would let me out.

"I've got dints in my hands and in my head from where I've been stabbed, he stabbed me in my mouth, he beat me with crowbars, sewer rods, and baseball bats. Some days I was p***ing blood."

But such was the hold that Kenny had over this young boy, despite the violence and abuse, when another gang raided the house, Joey chose to save his life rather than escape.

"One night all the windows started coming in on the house, and when we looked out there were five men coming towards us with guns," Joey recalls.

"I had pulled his [Kenny's] little one out onto the roof and I looked down and saw that they'd shot Kenny in the back. I got some towels and put them on him to stop the blood and called for an ambulance.

"I was trying to keep him alive, sometimes I don't know why, but it was just the right thing to do, I think."

But even after pulling Kenny back from the brink, the beatings and the abuse continued.

Joey said: "I went off to the hospital and he was lying there like Tony Soprano or the Godfather, wearing silk pyjamas.

"And he was real nice, saying, 'I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Joey'. But when everyone left, he grabbed me and asked me what I'd done with all the guns and the drugs, and I told him I'd put them in the field.

"When he got out of hospital, he had crutches and he battered me with them because some of the drugs were wet."

It wasn't until a gangland feud erupted and Kenny and his 'boss' Thomas Hinchon murdered rival Jonathan O'Reilly over territory, that Joey was able to escape his prison.

After the pair forced him to burn their clothes and get rid of the gun used to kill O'Reilly outside Dublin's Cloverhill prison in 2004, Kenny became more paranoid than ever.

He said: "After the murder, everything got worse. I wasn't allowed to go out of the house.

"He would take me into the fields in the middle of the night and shoot at me, telling me he could just throw me in a ditch and no one would ever find me."

He added: "And I'd kind of accepted my fate, I never thought I was ever going to get out. I had accepted the fact that I had no control and that I was going to die there."

But then something just 'clicked'.

"It was about two weeks after the murder, and I just couldn't take it anymore," Joey says.

"I knew there was a key to the front door, so I unlocked both of the doors and left it a few days to see if anyone noticed - I would have known if Brian had realised because he would have killed me.

"On the second night, I rang my sister from the drug phone, because I wasn't allowed one, and told her that I needed her to drive up to the house, call me when she was there, and to keep the engine running.

"I got out to the front of the house and jumped over the wall and got electrocuted, and I got into my sister's car and we just drove."

Joey was just 19 years old when he escaped Kenny's clutches, almost half of his life was spent in the gangster's iron grip.

He led police to the murder weapon and both Kenny and Hinchon were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of O'Reilly.

Following the trial, Joey was moved to England, and being left to fend for himself fell into a spiral of drugs and depression, trying on several occasions to take his own life.

Eventually, he was able to get the help he desperately needed and moved back to Ireland to be with his mother.

Though he is now counting down the days until Kenny's life sentence reaches its end, Joey, now in his thirties, says he knows he did the right thing.

"There's a 90 percent chance I'm going to die with a bullet in the head, but I've accepted that," he tells me.

"I live every day as if it's my last and I don't make long-term goals. I understand what I've done and the consequences that come with it.

"I never regret it, and if I had to do it again tomorrow, I would."

You can read about Joey's ordeal in The Witness, by Nicola Tallant or listen to the new podcast 'The Witness: In His Own Words'.

Featured Image Credit: Supplied/Collins Agency

Topics: Ireland, crime