Child Protection
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-01
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Gary Gannon (SD), Dublin Central

I can hear the Minister of State's passion for this area. The problem is that in 2017 or 2018 the Greentown project, in its first national survey, found that at any one time over 1,000 children in the State were being coerced into crime. Between 2018 and 2026, every metric has got worse. I have to assume the coercion of children into crime has got worse. The Greentown project has good outcomes but it is very small and geographically based. I would like to see a national programme that is funded, seeks to prioritise prevention and recognises that the factors that make a child vulnerable to be coerced into crime are often the conditions in which they are born, with poverty foremost among them.
Even today we are talking about young people on scramblers, which is very dangerous and we need to cut it out, but a lot of those young people have been coerced into using those scramblers to sell drugs. Only 17 charges have been made so far under Fagin's law. What are we going to do to improve how we go after people who are targeting children?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-01