Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
GARDAÍ RAIDED THE house of a drug dealing mother while her family and friends were staging an intervention for her about her lifestyle, a court has heard.
The woman who was caught dealing cannabis from her home avoided jail today after the court was told she has since “faced up to her addiction and her responsibility to her son”.
Debbie O’Reilly (35) formerly of Maple Avenue, Ballybrack, subsequently became homeless when the county council became aware of the offence. She and her 15-year-old son have since found permanent accommodation.
O’Reilly, who was addicted to the formerly legal drug PVP, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of cannabis herb for sale or supply at her then home on August 4, 2013. She has no previous convictions.
At a hearing last November the court heard that O’Reilly had been left devastated by what was described as “the tragic death” of her former partner and the father of her child in July 2013.
She was also having difficulties in her current relationship with a man known to gardaí.
She is no longer associated with this man and has moved out of the Ballybrack area.
Garda Ivor Scully agreed with Ronan Kennedy BL, defending, that when gardaí arrived to search O’Reilly’s home her family and friends were in the middle of “an intervention” with her as they had been concerned about her recent behaviour.
Gda Scully told Dara Hayes BL, prosecuting, that gardaí searched the house in Maple Avenue following a tip off that cannabis was being sold from the house.
O’Reilly made immediate admissions at the scene when the drugs were discovered.
O’Reilly co-operated fully with gardaí and took responsibility for the kilogramme of cannabis herb, worth €21,920. and 8 grams of PVP (a synthetic drug similar to cocaine), worth €312, that was found.
The drugs were found in a shopping bag in her shed, behind a kicker board in the kitchen and in her bedroom.
A total of €8,200 in cash, a digital weighing scales and an iPhone with evidence of drug dealing on it were also seized in the house.
Gda Scully agreed with Mr Kennedy that O’Reilly had been using PVP at the time and there would have been times when she wouldn’t have been particularly coherent.
He accepted she gave gardaí “a candid account of herself” and her offending, admitting that she had been giving out drugs to people. She had not been known to gardaí prior to that summer.
The garda agreed that O’Reilly is a lot better both mentally and physically since her arrest and is making efforts to get her life back on track. He said he was aware that she has been engaging in various services to address her addiction.
He agreed with a suggestion from Mr Kennedy that if O’Reilly, manages to address her addiction and stay away from her former associates, he is optimistic that she will not come to garda attention again.
Gda Scully said he believed her arrest and subsequent homelessness was “an extreme wake up call” and that she has begun “to learn the errors of her ways”.
Mr Kennedy said his client was aware that her behaviour supported others in the upper echelons of the drug dealing world and that she was “an essential cog in that wheel”.
“She can’t change what she done, but she has been given her life back and there are great signs for optimism going forward,” Mr Kennedy said.
Today Mr Kennedy handed several letters to the court detailing O’Reilly’s rehabilitation since the previous hearing, including letters from drug treatment programmes, a guidance counsellor, her son’s secondary school, and a certificate for completing a course in addiction studies.
Judge Mary Ellen Ring said O’Reilly was clearly a capable and intelligent young woman but for some reason started to abuse drugs before moving onto dealing.
Explaining that mitigating factors allowed her to set aside the minimum ten year sentence for serious drug offences, Judge Ring said Ms O’Reilly is “someone who has faced up to her addiction and her responsibility to her son and the greater community”.
Judge Ring suspended all five years of a five year jail term and directed O’Reilly to cooperate with probation services for twelve months.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
The rates are going back up but the level of service and overall standard of the hotels have gotten worse
yes especially if you are using a pigsback voucher!
That’s impressive
No doubt NAMA hotels probably loose €10,000 per room.
As a regular hotel user, prices are going up, service is going down, hoteliers are their own words enemy.
I would partially agree with you regarding hotels in Dublin City Centre. I don’t blame the staff though. The work most hotels make their staff do, along with the lengthy shifts are questionably legal at best.
In my opinion, many Dublin City Centre hotels are actually damaging the industry with their extortionate prices. Tourists may stay once, but they wont return at those costs!
10000 profit per room and most staff on min wage with little or no rights And as a long suffering hotel worker belive me thats true in most hotels
Sure look at the Callaghan hotel group that tried to force some of their foreign national workers to sign up for a cut in their minimum wage telling them they couldn’t afford to pay them but at same time were spending 10,000 euro a day in the high court trying to stop unions from stopping them… Some evil folk out there that’s for sure.
Sure half the hotels in dublin are owned by banks so no guesses were all the profits are gone into the pokets of the people who caused this in the first place
Hotel workers should join a union.
Dave, what purpose will that serve? A union can only do anything in the public sector and and even at that they do very very little. Unions have long forgotten their purpose and should be abandoned by every single worker in the public sector. Appoint people amongst yourselves to represent you and save yourself the money of funding the most ludicrous organisations in the country.
The argument is simple, they shd say, we took pay cuts, pay freezes etc when the hotels were in trouble.
Now they are making sky high profits and we want everything that was taken from us back + more.
Yeah the top of most unions are tied to the labour party etc, but I’m not sure about going it alone, it makes a big difference to have a union organiser talk to workers, rather than just starting from scratch.
Anyhow now a days you can join a union online, get your workmates to join the same one (in secret), and get a union organiser to meet them somewhere and take it from there.
exactly, and not just Hotels, they’d go about telling you then “ah business is slack, we’re very quiet, tourist trade is down” and so and so forth. Old Old excuses, total lies. They’ve been playing that card now for 5 years in order to cut wages, staff and feed their greedy mouths.
spot on Ashley, they’re ALL corrupt, right down the line
90% of hotels aren’t making any money, fact.
I could name 10 hotels that people think are “flying” but all with net worth of -€5m, there is no comeback from that, they only showed retained profits of €150k max even during the good times.
Hotels that have valued their assets upwards of €30 million but are worth nothing in today’s market, maybe 5-7m at a huge push.
Anyone with access to CRO figures for hotels will know what I’m on about.
Big hotels with golf clubs that are loosing 500-700k per year but the banks are not willing to move in as it will cost that to maintain the properties per year with the golf courses.
I dislike the idea of the average hotel price included! A separate weekend/weekday average would be needed as I know that the average prices listed above for Dublin are certainly not indicative of an average weekend room rate!
Also to add they now use the per person per room trick rather than room rate.
That’s the end of the recession so, we’ve turned the corner, spread the news
Quick everybody get a second car and a huge mortage we on d mend ha
The editor of the Indo’s property pages just got a semi.
I thought he was detached.
no no, we’re still in recession, we need to cut wages more and more, we still need that excuse to line our pockets, it’s our only hope cos we’re greedy :/
Dublin Dublin Dublin… Yawn.. That big green space West of the m50 will soon be called outer space the way this country is going….
Hotels in fields are you suggesting? I’m confused!
The European presidency filled many hotel rooms, it was a one off ! This should be a warning, next year the figures won’t look so good.
You’re hoping aren’t you?
Not that many, sorry to disappoint.
The EU presidency was in 2013 – this survey was taken in 2012.
That’s great news hopefully the rest of the industry picks up to
Articles like this have the potential to be quite damaging to the hotel industry! It’s not so black and white people!
No surprise there still being ripped off
good news though, keep it coming, its greedy stories like this that tell us all NOT to book a hotel room cos we know their workers are underpaid.
My above point is now proven!
have your say