The gangland thugs who stole my son
Mary O’Callaghan doesn’t deny the fact her heavy drinking impacted badly on her children, but when one of them told her of his involvement in a murder, it changed all of their lives forever
MARY O’Callaghan was in the local pub with her partner, enjoying a few quiet Sunday night drinks when her mobile phone rang. It was one of her daughters. ‘Mam, I’ve got Joey here with me, he’s in a bit of trouble. We need to see you now.’
A short time later she was holding her distraught youngest son in her arms in the back seat of his sister’s car. Although sobbing uncontrollably and shivering with fear, he managed to tell them what had happened over the previous few days.
Mary listened in stunned disbelief as he described his involvement in Dublin’s latest gangland killing. How he had cut up and burned the clothes the hitmen had worn, and how he had hidden the murder weapon in a field behind the house where he’d been living for the past couple of years.
He now believed that his own life was in serious danger, that the men who had assassinated 25-year-old Jonathan O’Reilly would kill him next. They had already threatened to shoot him, his mother, his sisters and his infant daughter.
He begged his mother to tell him what he should do. Mary willed herself to stay calm. Although she had feared Joseph had fallen in with a rough crowd, she had absolutely no idea of the kind of life he had been living.
For a few moments she just stared wordlessly at her 19-year-old son. Joseph had always been small for his age and tonight he looked younger than ever, the terror in his pale face palpable and heart-wrenching. She pulled him to her once more and held his quivering body close.
‘I didn’t know what to think, everything seemed so crazy, I’d never heard of anything like that before,’ she says. ‘I just remember thinking, “What am I going to do? Where do I go from here?”’
She brought her two children back to her home and as they sat at the kitchen table, it quickly became clear to her what needed to be done. ‘I said to him, “Look Joseph, you can’t live with this, the guards have to be told.” He kept saying he was afraid but I knew a guard who I trusted and liked, so I rang the station and luckily he was on that night.
‘He told me to bring Joseph down to them, but I said to him, “I’m only bringing him down if you promise me that you won’t separate us.” I stayed right by his side throughout it all.’
She was there when they drove him out to the house where Brian Kenny, one of the hitmen and a psychotic drug dealer, was living.
‘When they brought Kenny out of his house, I was with Joe, sitting in a car up the road. They told us to put our heads down so he wouldn’t see us as they drove past, it was like something out of a gangster movie,’ Mary says, still a little bewildered at the memory of that night.
The dark, dangerous world her son had become entangled in was so far removed from her own reality that it took some time for her to fully understand what had been happening under her nose. Indeed she has only become fully aware of all the horrific and sordid details since her son wrote a book with crime journalist Nicola Tallant, The Witness, about his teenage years. It was released this week.
‘I still haven’t read it yet, I’m a bit nervous,’ she says. ‘But the truth had to be told, about me and about his father.’
It’s highly likely Mary will find it extremely tough to read Joey ‘The Lips’ O’Callaghan’s account of his early years, back when she was heavily drinking and left his rearing to her older children.
It’s a harrowing yet gripping book, which chronicles his family’s life from Mary’s own comfortable childhood in a period redbrick in the heart of Ranelagh on Dublin’s southside, to their years spent in Ballymun, when it was in the grip of a heroin epidemic.
It’s not hard to understand, however, how Mary ended up battling her own demons, trying to drown out the abuse she experienced at the hands of her husband.
Things could have been so different for her.
She spent the first ten years of her life living on Anna Villa, a road just off Ranelagh’s main street. The middle of three children, her father was an electrician and her mother a housewife. They were comfortable, although the house in Ranelagh proved too difficult to upkeep, so they moved to Glasnevin when she was 10.
‘I’d a great childhood,’ she says. ‘We’d be out playing from first thing at morning until last thing at night, it was all very safe there. But the house itself needed an awful lot of work done to it, so they sold up and moved.’
Her school days were tough due to her dyslexia, a condition that wasn’t diagnosed or understood back then.
‘In those days you were just stupid,’ she says. ‘I was in a special class and ended up leaving school when I was 13 and got an apprenticeship at a hairdressers.’
It was at her next job, behind a counter in Roches Stores, where she met Noel O’Callaghan, a storeman who was nine years older than her. ‘I was about to turn 18 and still living at home with my parents,’ she says. ‘He was very handsome and charming.’
Within a year Mary was pregnant and engaged to Noel. ‘On the day I was getting married my father said to me, “You know, you don’t have to get married.” But I had seen the upheaval having a baby out of wedlock could cause, I couldn’t go through that.’
Even before their wedding day, Noel had been violent to Mary.
‘He’d hit me a few times but always said he was sorry and that it would never happen again,’ she says. ‘I didn’t really know what to think, I had never seen that kind of behaviour in my home, my father was a lovely and gentle man, I’d never even heard of domestic abuse.
‘I’d no doubts getting married, I loved him. But then I got battered on my wedding night, because I’d “trapped” him.’
By the time Mary was 28, she’d had five children. Noel never worked, instead he drank and gambled. After losing their home in Stoneybatter, Mary managed to get them a corporation flat in Ballymun.
‘It was in one of the four-storey blocks and it was in great condition,’ she says. ‘It felt like winning the Lotto.’
Her parents would help out as much as they could, giving her bags of groceries and slipping her cash during her weekly visits to them. Noel’s violence towards her continued.
‘He was horrendous,’ she says. ‘Never towards the children, just me. He tried to strangle me, he burnt me, he put a glass in my eye, dragged me down the stairs when I was pregnant.’
When Joey was 18 months old, Mary finally got a barring order against Noel. In order to make the split easier, she gave him the house where they’d been living together and let the older children choose who they would live with.
She then moved to London with two of her daughters and Joey. While there she had her final baby, another little girl.
A short time later, she returned
‘That night was like something out of a gangster movie’
‘I trusted him to keep Joseph out of trouble’
to Ballymun, to another flat and it was during this time that Mary began to drink heavily, a period Joey recounts in heart-breaking detail in the book.
At one point he was sexually abused by a neighbour, something Mary only heard about while he was doing the book.
‘I was heavily drinking for about two years,’ she says. ‘When I was listening to Joseph when he was talking about it to Nicola [Tallant], I felt such shame.
‘It’s not an excuse, but there had been a lot of violence in my life and drinking was my way of escaping. I got a good job as a cleaning supervisor, which got me back on the right track. I got a van and more responsibility and that helped my confidence.’
She also found a new partner, Niall, and together they saved enough money to buy a house in Blanchardstown.
The move, however wellintentioned, was to prove catastrophic for Joey. They ended up living opposite the Coates family, home of Shane Coates of the notorious Westies gang. Anxious to quash the friendship Joey had forged with Shane’s younger brother, Mary allowed him to take on a job with their local milkman, Brian Kenny, when he was 12.
Does Mary think there was something vulnerable about Joey that caused Kenny to target him?
‘Probably,’ she replies. ‘But also, up until he was 14 or 15 he had snow white hair and was very small for his age. He was a beautiful child, whether that caught Kenny’s eye, I just don’t know.
‘Joey was just looking for some pocket money. That’s all we thought it was.’
Kenny was charming and persuasive and promised he would look after Joey while teaching him the ropes of the milk delivery trade. It seemed like a perfect solution for a kid teetering on taking the wrong path.
In fact, Kenny was selling heroin from his float, building up his drugs business, which he quickly dragged 12-year-old Joey into.
‘I trusted him, I thought it was going to keep Joseph out of trouble, and that was the only reason I agreed to it,’ says Mary.
Over the years Joey got in deeper and deeper, delivering drugs through letterboxes, collecting money for debts owed, breaking into houses and stealing cars. He also began spending more time at Kenny’s home, where he was beaten and sexually abused by the thug for almost seven years.
He started to regularly use cocaine but for several years Mary says she didn’t notice anything different about his demeanour.
‘I was naïve,’ she says. ‘But also Joseph was very careful not to show it because he was terrified Kenny would hurt one of us, he kept threatening him with that.’
It wasn’t until her daughter rang her that Sunday night in 2004 that she was suddenly confronted with what he had been involved in.
Kenny and Thomas Hinchon had carried out a gangland hit and forced Joey to get rid of the evidence. After being persuaded by his mother to go to the guards, he agreed to give evidence against them during their murder trial.
Thanks to Joey, both men were found guilty and sentenced to jail. In return for his co-operation and to keep him safe, Joey was placed in the Witness Protection Programme. He is the youngest Irish person to ever enter the scheme, and to this day he goes by a different name, lives in a secret location and wears a bulletproof vest.
Once he went to the guards, everything changed for all of them. For safety reasons, Mary had to move out of her home, with two of her daughters and a grandchild, for some time.
There’s a part of Mary that still can’t quite believe that this is how her life has turned out.
A petite woman, with straight blonde hair, she looks younger than her 64 years. She has a soft, gentle voice, with only a trace of a Dublin accent.
And although visibly nervous, she is happy to be interviewed about Joey’s book. She would do anything for her son, their bond is strong and although she rarely sees him in person now, she is in regular contact.
While she may be nervous about what exactly Joey’s book will reveal, Mary is very aware of how her own behaviour when he was younger impacted on his life. She makes no excuses for the neglect he suffered in those early years.
Despite the fear of reprisal, Mary believes that Joey giving evidence at the trial was the right thing to do.
‘Of course it was,’ she says. ‘I don’t regret that, but I do regret what happened to Joseph after, with the Witness Protection Programme. They didn’t know what to do with him, they hadn’t a clue.
‘They’d promised me faithfully they wouldn’t send him away, but they did, to England and I had to say goodbye to my son in a car park. I was devastated, I never cried so much in my life and he was distraught. But he had no choice — if he hadn’t gone he’d have been left on his own.’
Joey had just turned 20 when he was sent to the UK on his own. He was miserable and addicted to prescription drugs at this point. Less than two years later he tried to kill himself and was sectioned.
‘I went over to him and he was like a little child,’ says Mary. ‘He’d nothing, not a penny, and was living in a flat in Britain. I gave him some money.’
About six weeks later Joey decided to just fly home and lived at his mother’s place in Ireland.
‘It was the safest place for him to be, no one would have expected him to be there,’ she says.
Was she not afraid of what could happen to her if he was spotted there? ‘I didn’t think about it, Joseph was my priority.
‘Even now, the way I look at it is I’m 64 years of age, if something happens to me, it happens,’ she says.
She is very critical of how Joey was treated in the Witness Protection system.
Only after a long fight did they persuade them to send him to The Priory, where he finally got the treatment and therapy he so desperately needed.
‘I think he’s happy now,’ she says. ‘He needed to do the book, for his peace of mind, and he deserves that.
‘I don’t know where his life will go from here to be honest, I’d love to see him meet someone and settle down and be happy. But as long as he has to keep looking over his shoulder that’s not going to happen.
‘All I do know for sure is that I’m very proud of him, that he came forward. And that he put his trust in me, because I let him down so badly in the early years. He’ll always be my baby.’
‘He needed to do the book for his peace of mind’