€800k-a-year to keep Ana killers
Taxpayers foot bill for teens jailed over schoolgirl murder
TAXPAYERS are shelling out almost €800,000 a year to keep Ana Kriegel’s killers behind bars, it has emerged.
Both Boy A and Boy B are being held at the Oberstown Detention Centre Campus for young offenders in Lusk, Co Dublin.
Last year it cost more than €21.18million to run the complex day to day, an average of €392,000 per inmate.
The Detention and Remand Centre has 54 places – six for girls and 48 for boys.
A total of 122 individual young people passed through it over the course of 2020.
Ana’s killers were the youngest ever convicted of murder in Ireland and are the longest serving in Oberstown.
The pair were both 13 at the time she was battered to death on May 14, 2018, at an abandoned old house not far from where she lived in Lucan, Co Kildare.
She was also sexually assaulted by Boy A. Ana’s body was found three days after she went missing.
Boy A got life for murder and 12 years for aggravated sexual assault. The sentences are running concurrently and will be reviewed after 12 years.
Boy B got a 15-year sentence for murder, to be reviewed after eight years.
There are no reports of any difficulties with them in Oberstown.
Both boys are now almost 16 and will be transferred to an adult prison – likely Wheatfield or the Midlands – when they turn 18.
They will be given new identities whenever they are eventually freed from jail.
The cost of running Oberstown was revealed by Children’s Minister Roderick O’gorman in reply to a written Dail question from Richard Boyd Barrett of People Before Profit.