THE KILLERS CLAIMING THOUSANDS IN BENEFITS

Treated for insanity and getting €198 a week

SOME of Ireland’s most notorious killers are each receiving up to €10,000 a year from the State in benefit payments.

Because they have been found not guilty by reason of insanity, they can earn up to €198 per week and some remain patients at the Central Mental Hospital for 30 years or more.

Among the dangerous inmates getting the disability allowance at the taxpayer’s expense are cannibal killer Saverio Bellante and Oisín Conroy, who strangled his girlfriend to death.

Killers who carried out some of the most shocking crimes receive the disability allowance, the

Department of Social Protection has confirmed.

A senior source said that many of the killers, who have carried out some of the country’s most heinous acts of violence, build up a ‘nest egg’ from their payments which they can access in the event of them being released.

There are several patients committed to mental hospitals after high-profile criminal trials.

These include Thomas Connors, who killed a stranger with a garden shears.

Another is Saverio Bellante, who ate part of the body of his victim, Tom O’Gorman, after a row broke out during a game of chess at the home they shared in Castleknock, north Dublin.

Italian native Bellante, 39, admitted killing his landlord with a dumbbell and a knife, and then eating part of the man’s lung, thinking it was his heart.

Prosecution counsel Patrick Gageby SC said Bellante was previously diagnosed with a mental disorder and with having religious hysterical delirium. He was treated by a psychiatrist in Italy.

Others in the Central Mental Hospital include 60-year-old James Redmond, who shot his neighbour Mary Dargan dead at her home in Tallaght, Dublin, in March 2014 – and also attempted to kill her daughter Karina by shooting her in the head.

During his trial, the court heard that months prior to the attack, Redmond was in a depressed state and had wrongly believed Karina Dargan was ‘chanting’ that he was a paedophile, and that the false allegation was being said about him in the wider community.

More recently, in 2017, Oisín Conroy, who strangled his girlfriend to death in order to ‘save her’, was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.

Conroy told gardaí there was a struggle in his mind ‘between the devil and Jesus’ and that a voice came in his head saying he had to kill his then girlfriend Natalie McGuinness.

In contrast, other patients at the CMH have been convicted of crimes so they cannot get the payment no matter how long they stay at the hospital.

The Department of Justice told the Irish Daily Mail in a statement: ‘A person who is detained... retains their entitlement to disability allowance.

‘In these circumstances, a person has been found to be either unfit to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity, and to be in need of in-patient care or treatment. They are not imprisoned or detained in legal custody but detained for care or treatment purposes.’

There are more than 50 people at the country’s main psychiatric hospital in receipt of the disability allowance, the department added. The hospital has a maximum capacity of 93.

The vast majority of patients are sent from the court after they were found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The department said it could not confirm which patients at the hospital were in receipt of the weekly €198 disability allowance.

But senior security sources say it is ‘widely accepted in the criminal justice system that virtually every patient found not guilty by reason of insanity gets this payment’. A source added: ‘Sure why wouldn’t they? They are entitled to it and if they are eventually allowed out, they have a massive nest egg, unlike those being released from jail after being convicted of a crime.’

In one case just last month, a Polish man was found not guilty of the attempted murder of his partner, whom he beat with a hammer and tried to suffocate by stuffing underwear in her mouth. Tomas Gajowniczek, 37, was found not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted murder of his ex-partner Alicja Kalinowska, 30, in Dublin in 2016. He has also now been committed to the CMH.

The Mental Health Criminal Law Review Board is responsible for examining the detention of patients who have been referred to the CMH after a decision by the courts that they are unfit to stand trial or having been found not guilty by reason of insanity.

It emerged in a report last year that half of all patients who are detained in the Dundrum hospital have been charged with, or convicted of, murder.

‘They are detained for care purposes’