A VIGILANTE GROUP targeting potential online child exploitation brought a convicted sex offender to a garda station after a sting operation on Facebook, a court has heard.

In August 2024, Michael Macken, 41, was caught having highly sexualised conversations with what he believed were nine different teenage girls. 

The Facebook accounts were actually adults pretending to be young teens in order to expose potential child predators and the “children” did not exist.

Macken, with a former address in Stoneybatter, Dublin, was charged with nine counts of communicating with a person with the intention to facilitate sexual exploitation of a child and pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to a number of sample counts.

He was also charged with six counts of attempting to send sexually explicit material to a child and pleaded guilty to a single sample count.

Detective Garda Keith Alford told Aideen Collard BL, prosecuting, that on a date in August 2024 about 20 people from a “self appointed” vigilante group came to Macken’s parents’ home in Coolock, where he was then living.

The Northern Ireland based group, calling themselves Child Online Protection Enforcers NI, confronted Macken with evidence that he had been trying to contact children online for sexual exploitation.

Seoirse Ó Dúnlaing SC, defending, put it to Garda Alford that some of the group were wearing hi-vis vests and that at one stage his client, who has extremely low intellectual functioning, believed they were gardaí.

Counsel said that some of the group “bundled” Macken into a car and drove him to the garda station where “there was uproar”. The court heard a public order incident outside the garda station led to two people from the group being charged with public order offences.

Gardaí took Macken into custody for his own protection. He then admitted he had been using Facebook to contact children who he believed were 14 years old and younger. He said he did it because he was bored.

In text conversations read out in court, Macken asked some of the girls if they would get into bed with him. He asked one girl to undress and touch her breasts and asked another to send him pictures of her in bed in her nightie.

He asked one girl, who told him she was 12, for a photo of her in bed and asked if her breasts would fit in his hand. He asked another girl for a photo of her in her uniform.

On WhatsApp, he texted one girl about inserting objects inside herself and invited her to take a video call. He asked if he could ejaculate on her and sent her links to online adult porn and asked if she would do what she saw on the website. Detective Garda Alford said the profile image on the WhatsApp account was “obviously a young girl”.

Macken has two previous convictions for sexual assault, including the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl at an amusement arcade in Trabolgan, Co. Cork in 2006.

Mr Ó Dúnlaing told the court that his client did not apply for bail after his arrest for charge on 21 February, 2025.

Judge Orla Crowe adjourned sentencing until 14 May when she will also hear a full plea of mitigation from defending counsel. She remanded Macken into continuing custody.