A JAILED drug dealer used a trip to a children’s hearing to smuggle nearly £800-worth of heroin into a high security prison, a court has heard.

Brendan McGivern was serving a sentence at Glenochil Prison, Clackmannanshire, at the time, after pleading guilty last year to battering his girlfriend with a shoe and attacking a 13-year-old girl who had tried to defend her.

The father of five picked up nearly two ounces of heroin that had been hidden in a toilet cubicle at a building in Perth where the Children’s Hearing was being held.

McGivern, who was transported from the jail to attend the hearing, had asked to use the toilet.

Falkirk Sheriff Court heard that guards who were accompanying him became suspicious that he might have picked something up in the toilet area.

He was searched on his return to Glenochil, and found in possession of four wraps of brown powder, which turned out to be heroin.

Prosecutor Graham McLachlan said the total weight of the drug was 52 grams, which would have been worth £740 in jail.

He said: “That’s predicated on sub-division into 3.5 gram deals.”

Two mobile phones and a SIM card were also found in his cell.

Another mobile had been found in McGivern’s cell in September last year, after warders received a tip-off and staged an on-the-spot search.

McGivern, 35, of Blairgowrie, Perthshire, pleaded guilty to possessing three mobile phones and the heroin, the latter with intent to supply.

Paul Ralph, defending, said he had been put under pressure in the jail after the loss of the first mobile.

Jailing him for two years and four months, Sheriff Craig Caldwell said: “You took part in what was clearly a carefully-planned exercise to introduce a significant amount of class A drugs to the prison, for dissemination and distribution among the inmates there.

“The extremely adverse effects of the use of drugs in prison are well-known.”