A 49-year-old woman with no criminal record has been jailed for four years for storing more than €1.5 million worth of cannabis in her Dublin home.
Oana Onofrei, who will turn 50 next week, was finding it hard to pay the rent on her Lucan house when she agreed to sublet a room to men “for weed”.
Onofrei, with an address at St Edmunds Grove in Lucan, who was before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Friday, pleaded guilty to possession of the drugs for sale or supply at her home there on November 13th, 2025.
The court heard gardaí searched her home after receiving information and observing a delivery there. A total of €1,556,000 worth of cannabis was found.
Onofrei told detectives she had lost a tenant the previous Christmas and she had struggled to pay her rent. She then met a number of men in a local park who offered her €1,000 a month for the room.
She said she “knew it was for weed” and that they just needed a room to store and sort the drugs, and she provided them with a key.
As well as getting €1,000 a month for the room, sometimes the men would leave money on bags and text her, asking her to deliver them. She had been asked to download the Signal App, and this was used to give her instructions.
She said the first deliveries were small, and referred to one that was larger. There was €50 left on top of that bag.
The defendant, who had no previous convictions, said she was very sorry about it and would rather kill herself than get involved again. She said it was to help her family to live.
Diana Stuart, defending counsel, noted her client was not on the Garda radar before this and did not fit the profile of the person they expected to meet that day. She had always worked full-time and came from a good family, who had now effectively disowned her.
Counsel said her client had been working at Tesco Home Deliveries and renting a home in Lucan, a very affluent part of Dublin, but that her rent was extremely high.
She had been finding life very difficult and ended up smoking cannabis, which was when she agreed to keep “this enormous amount of cannabis in the house”. She had no understanding of how grave her offence was, she added.
“She now realises she can’t afford to live in this property,” she said.
Judge Martin Nolan accepted that she had made little or no profit, having heard that she never had the money to take up her €5,000 bail. However, he said she was a reasonably vital cog in the gang’s operations.
“I’ve come to the view that she’s unlikely to reoffend,” he said.
Nolan said the headline sentence for this offence would ordinarily be eight years but, given mitigation, he would cut it in two.
He sentenced her to four years in prison, and backdated it to November when she went into custody.