Duke of Marmalade
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Prison is about deterrence. Clearly teenage men are much more likely to comit these crimes. The punishment should be higher, just as their insurance premiums are higher!
Is it it time for "children" who commit adult crimes to be treated as criminals?
- Thread starter Brendan Burgess
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Brilliant idea. Sadly can already here two dozen quangos squawking on about ooman rights.
A strong Govt would just plough on with it, probably cheaper than holding them here as well.
Duke of Marmalade
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The Irish Times were at this in today's editorial. They just about resisted blaming climate change or Brexit.
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Sarah Ryan
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These young lads have (had) a skill with cars, why not use it for good. Ok school clearly not for them, but had these young folks half a brain, opportunity, backing, support, could they have been great mechanics?
Young lives wasted, are we doing our best to stop teenagers like this falling through the cracks?
Or is making a life for yourself just not well, cool enough?
I would love to delve deeper into the family dynamics to see where they came from, all to easy too assume where they came from. For all we know parents might have needed to wash their hands of them to save younger ones from following in their footsteps.
Until I have the facts I shall reserve the judgement in private.
Young lives wasted, are we doing our best to stop teenagers like this falling through the cracks?
Or is making a life for yourself just not well, cool enough?
I would love to delve deeper into the family dynamics to see where they came from, all to easy too assume where they came from. For all we know parents might have needed to wash their hands of them to save younger ones from following in their footsteps.
Until I have the facts I shall reserve the judgement in private.
Brendan Burgess
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Coimisiún na Meán are on to tik tok
www.rte.ie
I think that BMW should be held accountable as apparently they make cars which can be driven down the wrong way.
And what about Transport Infrastructure Ireland? Surely they must shoulder their share of the blame for providing the motorway in the first place?
TikTok asked for 'full account' over social media posts
Coimisiún na Meán has said it has asked social media platform TikTok for a "full account" of what measures it has taken over risky and reckless driving content on its platform.
I think that BMW should be held accountable as apparently they make cars which can be driven down the wrong way.
And what about Transport Infrastructure Ireland? Surely they must shoulder their share of the blame for providing the motorway in the first place?
Funeral notice removed from rip.ie
From today's Irish Times:
"A funeral notice for one of the teenagers killed in the M9 crash on Sunday morning has been removed from RIP.ie."
"RIP.ie, which is owned by The Irish Times Group, said it did not comment on individual funeral notices. Undertaker Joe Rigney, of Rigneys Funeral Directors, declined to comment on the removal of the notice."
"Funeral notices for the four other teenagers who died ... have not yet been published."
You'd wonder who decided to publish it in the first place. Not the smartest move perhaps.
From today's Irish Times:
"A funeral notice for one of the teenagers killed in the M9 crash on Sunday morning has been removed from RIP.ie."
"RIP.ie, which is owned by The Irish Times Group, said it did not comment on individual funeral notices. Undertaker Joe Rigney, of Rigneys Funeral Directors, declined to comment on the removal of the notice."
"Funeral notices for the four other teenagers who died ... have not yet been published."
You'd wonder who decided to publish it in the first place. Not the smartest move perhaps.
You'll probably find that some or most of the kids were already known to TUSLA, that there was family histories of addiction/abuse etc.
The "falling in with the wrong crowd" notion is what middle class parents think but the reality is that in many cases there is only the wrong crowd for them to fall in with.
That's very hard to do. We used to be much more proactive at taking children from their parents and we all know where that ended. How much State intervention in our personal lives should we tolerate in order to have the required level of prevention?
For many kids that's never on their horizon.
Maybe the parents didn't care, maybe they cared deeply and did everything they could be curb the behaviour. Maybe the parents were criminals. Maybe their child's behaviour was consuming them and destroying their lives. Maybe one or both of the parents wasn't around. Maybe the parents are addicts or suffering from another disease. We have no idea what the family circumstances were and we probably will never know.
Agreed.
What I do know is that the 5 kids knew the difference between right and wrong and chose to put other people in harms way. I know that they are 100% responsible for their actions and I know that I have no sympathy for any of them.
I also know that there's no easy fix for this kind of crime and I think that the Gardai should be allowed to use any method necessary to stop a car being driven like that and that no consideration whatsoever should be given to the safety or lives of the occupants of the car. All that matters is minimising the risk to other road users.
Chain gangs are very expensive and really only existed in Australia and in the Southern State of America and in the USA were closely tied to slavery.
Prison has a number of functions but the overriding one is to make society safer.
Detection, or the perception that one will be caught, is more of a deterrent than draconian sentences since we never think the bad thing will happen to us (same reason we smoke and take other risks). Rehabilitation is also an important function of prisons since people with a reasonable chance to earn an honest living and who are free from addiction are less likely to commit crimes. Punishment is of course a function of the prison system but there is no correlation between increasingly severe sentences are reductions in crime.
That said there has to be a correlation between no sentences and high crime rates. That's what we have now; young offenders effectively getting away with crimes without any real consequences.
Howth Head
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And it looks like some of these thugs were well-known to the Gardai, even at such a young age. The sad truth is that these guys would have gone on to a life of very serious crime. They truly do not care about consequences or deterrents. (I know a senior garda - now retired - who told me he arrested three generations of the same family during his career. (Yes, one of those families.)
Pustkowski, who was primarily based in Limerick, was well known to gardaí across the country, and a garda alert had been in place for him.
He was facing multiple charges before the courts for offences relating to being a passenger in stolen vehicles and other matters.
As part of his bail conditions, he was not supposed to leave Limerick at any time.
Gardaí in Kilkenny were also seeking his arrest after they identified him as part of a gang that stole a car in Castleblayney, Co Monaghan. After the theft, the group travelled to a rural location in the county, where they stole a wallet containing a bank card.
Minister contacts Road Safety Authority over its lack of visibility in aftermath of M9 collision
https://jrnl.ie/7135983
Another Minister completely out of his depth. Imagine actually sitting down with your box of crayons and writing such a letter to the RSA.
Idiotic.
https://jrnl.ie/7135983
Another Minister completely out of his depth. Imagine actually sitting down with your box of crayons and writing such a letter to the RSA.
Idiotic.
What's idiotic about asking the Road Safety Authority to involve itself in road safety?
I think he's absolutely correct to question their silence.
Brendan Burgess
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It's just another idiotic attempt to blame someone else. What on earth could the Road Safety Authority do about this type of incident? Run a campaign in schools to educate pupils that driving down motorways the wrong way for tik tok likes is dangerous?
There were 5 people to blame for this. The 5 teenagers involved. Blaming anyone else such as the Gardai, Tik tok, The Road Safety Authority is just distracting people.
How was it an attempt to blame anyone other than the kids involved? The RSA is tasked with running road related public safety campaigns. They have done very little of that for at least a decade. Remember the ads they used to have on TV? Why are they not doing that on social media now? Not particularly in relation to these recent crashes but generally.
Ceist Beag
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I think that is in bad taste personally Brendan.Coimisiún na Meán are on to tik tok
I think that BMW should be held accountable as apparently they make cars which can be driven down the wrong way.TikTok asked for 'full account' over social media posts
Coimisiún na Meán has said it has asked social media platform TikTok for a "full account" of what measures it has taken over risky and reckless driving content on its platform.
And what about Transport Infrastructure Ireland? Surely they must shoulder their share of the blame for providing the motorway in the first place?
Why shouldn't Coimisiún na Meán contact Tik Tok about this? Why shouldn't these social media companies be forced to do more to prevent the publication to the world of criminal activities? These companies act as if they are above the law so they should be held to account. Can you imagine RTE or Virgin Media running programs showing this type of content? So why should it be any different online.
I agree with you. There's a high chance that without social media these crimes wouldn't be happening. If there's no audience then there's no performance.
Brendan Burgess
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It is reasonable for CnM to ask Tik Tok about their policies and practices.
But I don't think that they could have done anything about the crash.
What I object to is the way all these bodies jump up and down blaming people as an instant reaction to something like this. It requires a more considered response and the key point is that it is the 5 kids who are to blame. And the focus should be on them and not on TikTok or the Gardai or the Road Safety Authority.
I think the focus is on them, certainly the blame is on them and rightly so.
What we as a society can do to minimise the chance of this happening again and what State bodies can do to further that objective is, in my opinion, a reasonable and relevant conversation to have.
We have around the average number of police per capita compared to our EU neighbours (but more than England) and we have around the average per capita spend. Maybe we need more due to our small size and the inevitable economies of scale in larger countries. These issues are all part of the conversation we need to have around policing and security.
Duke of Marmalade
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Agree absolutely.
The RSA is identified with messages aimed at law abiding citizens. For the RSA to have made any comment on this abomination would leave a faint suggestion that (a) the victims had some blame to share, and (b) what these hooligans were doing was at worst dangerous driving.
This incident had absolutely nothing to do with road safety.
The RSA were right to avoid any sense of "normalising" this as just a road safety issue. And as @Persia hinted, it would be better if the Minister were back in play school.
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