Soon he was regularly delivering heroin and collecting payment. He had seen needles on the ground in Ballymun when he was growing up but he had never seen heroin. The first time he was told by Kenny to drop some heroin in a letter box he didn’t even know what it was. It turned out that Kenny’s milk run was really a front for a heroin delivery business. Years later he would be diagnosed with PTSD. Joseph O’Callaghan was a traumatised child. And then he took the bloody top off and put a jacket on and zipped it up … Brian said, ‘If you ever rob from me, that’s what happens’.” “Then said ‘Get me a bottle of milk’ and he took his top off and he poured the milk over his hands and washing the blood off everything. “I could just hear screams and the smacks and there was blood all over him,” says O’Callaghan. O’Callaghan says that Kenny leapt from their van, pulled the boy into a garden and started violently beating him with a hammer. Not long after this, he says, they passed another milk truck that was carrying a boy who had worked for Kenny before and who Kenny claimed owed him money. After the first time, he says, “it was like nothing happened. He says that one night during the milk run, Kenny started to sexually abuse him, something he continued to do for years. Joseph loved the job at first, but quickly things soured. I was going out with my uniform and instead of dropping me to school he was bringing me to Ballymun to collect and sell He said something like ‘Can you run fast?’ and I said ‘Yeah, I can run faster than any of them’.” You could see them running along with the truck with all the bottles … And I knew one of the guys from school and he worked on the truck. At the time, Joseph was just thrilled he got to work on a milk float. Now, looking back, Mary thinks Kenny could sense Joseph’s vulnerability. When he was even younger, he had been friends with the younger brother of Shane Coates of the Westies. His father, who still lived in Ballymun, had also been violent with his mother. Joseph had been sexually abused once by a person in the neighbourhood when the family lived in Ballymun. Joseph was home alone, suspended from school, and enamoured with the idea of being a milkman. O’Callaghan first met Brian Kenny when he was 12 and Kenny, then a milkman, called to his door in Blanchardstown. I didn’t even sign up to sell heroin … I signed up to be a milkman for pocket money.” Milk and heroin I was in the room bagging heroin when they came back and told me they murdered somebody. He is now 35 and is the subject of a new book, The Witness, written by Sunday World reporter Nicola Tallant. O’Callaghan was 18, the youngest person to go into Ireland’s witness protection programme. In 2005, O’Callaghan testified against Brian Kenny and Thomas Hinchon, who were accused of the murder of Jonathan O’Reilly outside Clover Hill Prison the year before.

I went because it was the right thing to do The judge said he believed that if was to get bail I would be dead in a few days.” “ told the guard who was next to me – a big tall fella – to stand in front of Kenny and made Kenny sit down so he wouldn’t intimidate me.

He was jumping up and down … Nodding and looking at me and staring. I thought he was going to climb over the box. “And Brian Kenny was there like a crazed f**king lunatic. I couldn’t see them but then they put me into the box and when I turned around then I could see everyone. They brought me up into this courtroom and there were guards all around me and I couldn’t see anyone but I could hear people… They walked me through the court and you could hear people going ‘rat’, ‘snitch’, ‘grass’. “There were jeeps on each side with men with guns. ‘They drove me up from Naas on the wrong side of the road,” says protected witness Joseph O’Callaghan.

The witness book