Keith Redmond jailed over explicit messages sent to decoy posing as a child

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

Keith Redmond was sentenced at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on 7 March 2024 to two years in prison, with the final six months suspended for one year. The proceedings were reported on 7 March 2024.

Redmond pleaded guilty to attempting, by electronic means, to disseminate sexually explicit material to a child between 30 August and 3 December 2022.

The court heard that a UK group had created a decoy called Amber, presented as a 14-year-old girl, and that the decoy connected with Redmond on the social media platform Kick. Their correspondence ran to 83 pages, and Redmond sent four photographs of his penis in November 2022. Judge Orla Crowe said he moved the conversation to a private platform when he knew the decoy was 14.

Anne Rowland SC, defending, said Redmond had not set out to contact an underage girl and that a message had come to him. She said he had described the exchange as a fantasy and had not attended an arranged meeting. She argued that the group's methods bordered on entrapment and said no real person was involved or being abused. The court heard that the planned meeting did not happen because Redmond did not book flights.

On 4 March, Judge Crowe adjourned finalisation of the case to reread the messages. At sentencing, she considered Redmond's early guilty plea, admissions, surrender of his phone to gardaí and lack of previous convictions. She ordered one year of Probation Services supervision after release and no unsupervised access to children.