IN THE WAKE of the murders of friends Jordan Davis and Sean Little, both 22-years-old, in the space of 24 hours, there is concern about the numbers of young people who continue to join gangs across the country.

Davis was shot dead at 4pm Wednesday in a lane way adjacent to Our Lady Immaculate National School in Darndale. He was pushing his infant son in a buggy at the time.

His friend Sean Little was found dead the night before beside a car that had been set alight at Rowans Little, Walshestown, Balbriggan.

Speaking about the killings in Ballymun garda station yesterday, Assistant Commissioner Pat Leahy appealed to young people – young men in particular – not to get involved at any level in the drugs trade.

He said a potential “unintended consequence” of the force’s success in cracking down on the feuding Hutch and Kinahan gangs was the creation of a void that other gangs – and younger members of them – were fighting to fill.

“We’ve been dealing with a pretty serious feud with strong international links over the last few years – we’ve been very, very successful in that regard. Lots of the people involved in the top tier of that have been convicted of murder and attempted murder and conspiring in many ways around that feud,” he said.

“A lot of them have left the country at this point in time which has probably left a bit of a void of who’s going to continue the trade so we do see younger people getting involved in that vacuum that has been created.

“Unfortunately an unintended consequence of that is that people living in communities are seeing younger people with access to money and access to cars and access to women and access to everything that goes with more funding from the drugs trade.

However he warned those young people that one of the outcomes of that choice is that “you don’t get to live a full life”.

Tiernan Williams, manager of the Reach Out Project with Kilbarrack Coast Community Programme told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the gangs take advantage of the vulnerability of these young men who said his organisation works with.

He said for young men coming from underprivileged backgrounds, often with a lot of trauma and few opportunities, the gangs offer them “economic hope”.

“Their view of the world is quite restricted, it’s kind of attractive to get into something that gives you a bit of hope,” he said.