Paul Hopkins: Our troubled teenagers... perpetrators or victims?
Here's a fact: There has been an “explosion in crimes” against retailers in recent years involving “gangs of feral youth” and, “crime, fraud, abuse, theft and shoplifting happen every day in [our] stores” an Oireachtas Committee heard when retailers appeared last week in front of them to discuss how such behaviour was affecting businesses.
Bettystown and Laytown come to mind.
Another fact: James Morrisroe, deputy general secretary of the Garda Representative Association (GRA), says frontline members are “exasperated trying to deal with this criminality with one hand tied behind their backs”. He claims the legislation “is skewed” in favour of the offenders, and the system requires a radical and urgent reset. “The softly-softly approach has utterly failed, and it’s time for some swift decisions where the public are protected and offenders punished appropriately by introducing legislation aimed at protecting society from such wanton criminality,” he says
However, here's the most pertinent fact: Not all young people are feral by any stretch of the imagination. And that includes all the young people I know or come across. Young people, many at college applying themselves diligently – our third level attendance is 56% higher than the EU average – while holding down a part-time job in in the hostelries and watering holes I frequent. They are bright, interactive, conversational and darn-good at bar-tending or serving a table for dinner. Yet, this generation are perhaps the most disaffected since the Baby Boomers when it comes to housing, the cost of living and health services – among other issues. The State is continuously failing them. They carry on, though, with determination
Yet, many adults, who engage with social media, lump all our young people into this "feral corral", particularly the mid-teens. Covid saw them getting a lambasting for allegedly spreading the rogue microbe by "running around in hordes" within the 5km travel restriction.
That said, we have to consider the growing prevalence of those youths who have been running amok in East Meath and elsewhere – and the five 'boys', the perpetrators, at the centre of the tragic M9 carnage.
Amid the clamour for more police and tougher sentences, Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times attempted to expand our understanding of the environment of these perpetrators’ in 'feral gangs'. O’Toole contrasts the transformation that occurred in Dublin's north inner city with the development of the Irish Financial Services Centre during the Celtic Tiger years and the "largely illusory" transformation experienced by the people of the area, as the Government purposely created “Ireland’s most starkly segregated social space”.
Talk about the haves and the have-nots.
But it goes deeper than that. We cannot escape the fact that some of our young offenders have experienced homelessness, mental ill-health, – think the ongoing CAMHS ineptitude – abuse or violence at points in their formative years. In many cases of young people turning to crime, they come from dysfunctional families who, in turn did likewise. (It was not until 1979 that the last tenement in Dublin closed at 14 Henrietta Street).
We reap what we sow.
Renowned Dutch criminologist Louk Hulsman warns that we create a counter-reality when we only understand an individual in the context of their offence, completely isolated from “his environment, his friends, his family, the material substratum of his world". The ambition of criminal justice systems should be the tempering of violence in society and not just meting out more violence in response to the initial offence.
Peter McVerry SJ has proposed two underlying issues to why young boys form gangs where violence is a rite of passage or a graduating ritual. First, the community fabric of these areas has been torn asunder by decades of active neglect and under-investment by the State. Second, these boys (intimidating as they may be) are alienated from any sense of belonging to a State which values them. Granted, drugs use and drug-induced psychosis play no small part. When a social issue like youth violence is understood in a simplistic way — just “feral” youth — the solution proffered is likewise simple. If the only answer is punishment, McVerry says it should be acknowledged that "the pains of imprisonment are potentially deadly for children and young people".
In the final analysis, if we consider the structural failings behind many of these stories, we can only conclude that the public outcry for tougher sentences for young offenders is a simplistic and knee-jerk reaction for our failures as a State.
As a people...