The country's young people became eligible for Asbos this week, but are they any more out of control than any generation that came before - and is more legislation the best way to tackle the problem of unruly youth, asks Kathy Sheridan
'There is not a large town throughout the country where you have not got 20 or 30 of them with their clipped hair, pants made in a certain style, going around among the people with their lady friends in slacks, and causing a great deal of trouble. They are nothing but a pack of brats, but where they can get away with it they can become as much a menace as the itinerants" - Capt Giles TD, addressing the Dáil on "Teddy Boys", July 11th, 1956.
In a week when the headlines and airwaves suggested that an entire generation of children is smoking, doping and drinking itself into a national nightmare, while simultaneously terrorising adults and gagging for anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos), it was easy to forget that the vast majority are out there getting on with life, calmly, soberly and decently. Or trying.
"I do know where people are coming from - there is a small group out to cause trouble. But the problem is we're all stereotyped just because we're young and wearing a hoodie," says Pádraig Ó Tomhnair, a 19-year-old childcare student from north inner-city Dublin. "You're out on the street with friends, not causing hassle, but older people and gardaí just see you as causing a nuisance. Depending on how bad they are, they'll call you anything from 'drug pusher', 'drug dealer', 'criminal' to 'thief' - anything the young would be labelled as, really."
The campaigning slogans on the hoodies to be unveiled by Pádraig and his mates on the North City Centre Community Action Project are a plea for perspective: "Don't hold what you think I might be doing against me"; "100% Harmless"; "Whatever You Say I Am, I Am Not".
Then again, the next generation is always worse. Fear and loathing of young people and the identification of a "new" breed of unruly, predatory, feral youth is nothing new.
The same generation that became eligible for Asbos this week, also - coincidentally or otherwise - hit the headlines and the phone-ins, courtesy of oldish studies assembled in the first State of the Nation's Children report from the Office of the Minister for Children.
The report reproduced a survey from four years ago that stated 57 per cent of 15-year-olds had had five or more alcoholic drinks in a row in the previous 30 days. That dovetailed with the news that a fifth - or 3,500 - of the 17,517 children aged between seven and 17 who were referred to the Juvenile Liaison Diversion Programme in 2005 were there because of alcohol. Drug possession was responsible for 6 per cent.
And yet a nation of adults in heavy denial about alcohol abuse erupted over a four-year-old study that suggested 40 per cent of our 15-year-olds had admitted to having - in the precise words of the study - "used an illicit drug in their lifetime". Oddly, this suggested an increase of just 3 per cent on 1995, before the boom really got going.
While the airwaves hummed with parental denial, the Taoiseach was telling the Dáil that just because teenagers "sampled" one drink or smoked "one fag", it didn't make them "junkies or winos". "I do not believe it. I do not believe it. I do not see it," he insisted.
As a Naas teenager was composing his letter to The Irish Times to tell us that "cannabis is more accessible than tobacco" and urging the Government to make it "safe and legal", Enda Kenny was calling for random drug-testing in schools and for young people.
And as young people were asking "why just young people?", another study was unveiled yesterday, revealing that 60 per cent of grown women continue to drink while pregnant. So why just young people? Dr Ursula Kilkelly, senior lecturer at UCC's faculty of law, was asking the same question. "Looking at issues such as drugs and alcohol abuse in isolation, and identifying them as issues for kids only, will take you only so far. They are a reflection of what's going on in society, of what's going on in the adult world; they are a problem for everyone, but society is not willing to see it like that, therefore they are identified as a problem for youth. What we are seeing here is a total failure of political leadership and accountability. So there's a lot of negative stereotyping going on."
"Every decade has its moral panic. Every generation looks back on its own generation and remembers it as a time when everyone was well-behaved and you could leave your door open . . . All rubbish, of course," says Dr Eoin O'Sullivan of Trinity College Dublin's department of social studies, who has written extensively on the Irish criminal justice system.
IN THE EARLY 1920s, there were no fewer than 6,000 children locked away in Irish reformatories and industrial schools. The fearful tone of the General Prisons Board's 1925 report is timeless. It perceived the emergence of "an entirely new class of criminal, composed of half-educated youths who would appear to have escaped early from parental control. They have grown up in lawless habits, and the streets and the cinema have been the main source of their moral education. Full of new and unsatisfied desires, these youths have been dazzled by sensational reports in the newspapers of large sums of money obtained by organised robbery, and they are seduced by the prospect of getting money easily without having to work for it honestly."
Alcohol was a hot topic too. There was much talk of sterner penalties to eliminate drunkenness from the streets.
In the 1930s, the big issue was child sex abuse, though not labelled as such. Internet contact may be new but paedophilia, clearly, is not. In one four-year period in the 1930s, 100 men were jailed for "defiling" girls under 13. The attorney general attributed the increase in such offences to "greatly enlarged opportunities for amusement and enjoyment", suggesting that it was "due in part to the relaxation of parental control".
In a call for harsher penalties, the then Garda commissioner, Eoin O'Duffy, gave other examples (including full names of perpetrators and victims): a 27-year-old convicted of the sodomy of a 14-year-old boy and acts of gross indecency with three other boys; a father who raped his 10-year-old son; rapes involving six- and seven-year-old girls. Bestiality also featured in Garda reports; mares, ponies and donkeys were not safe in their sheds.
In the 1940s, Archbishop McQuaid was concerned about girls under 17, who "are placed in dangerous surroundings and have marked tendencies toward sexual immorality", and wanted to establish a special reformatory for them.
Meanwhile, the minister for justice identified a new breed of criminal and crime. Indicative of this were the 507 overcoats stolen from hotels and restaurants in the Dublin metropolitan area.
With the 1950s came the next new scourge: the Teddy Boys. "Lack of parental control is the whole cause of the trouble," deputy PJ Burke told the Dáil.
Those were the rare aul' times of song and story when men were men, youngsters deferred to their elders and the key could be left in the door.
Meanwhile, more than 1 per cent of the population was locked away in prisons, borstals, reformatories and industrial schools, psychiatric hospitals (as involuntary patients) and homes for unmarried mothers. Any remaining problems were exported: in the 1950s, Irish emigrants accounted for 12 per cent of the prison population in the UK.
In 1960, nearly 3,000 Irish-born males were committed to England and Welsh prisons, compared with just over 1,700 committals to prison in Ireland. But in a story as old as politics and pre-election tub-thumping, Capt Giles declared to the Dáil that same year that "no one is safe in the city of Dublin or any of the other cities".
AND SO IT has continued. "A few years ago, all the talk was about 'zero tolerance'. That quickly disappeared. When did you last hear anyone talking about it?" asks Dr O'Sullivan. "The same will happen with Asbos. They will disappear in a few years too." Nonetheless, as of last Thursday, they are available to the Garda, presented as "a last resort" provision by a Government that has yet to introduce key measures of the Children Act 2001, six years on.
In the lead-up to the introduction of child Asbos this week, the airwaves - interwoven with stories of drug-addled teens - reverberated with the stories of people whose lives have been devastated by rampaging children. Those who raised any reservations about the Asbo response were made to look like silly, liberal cranks.
The no-nonsense director of a youth offender programme in a Munster inner city area sighs in exasperation: "They didn't work in England. They were seen almost as a trophy there. The children who are causing problems already have the stigma of being on the Juvenile Liaison or young offenders list so why would they be worried by an Asbo?" Many of the most troublesome children, she says, "seem to grow up where emotion in a man is not allowed. They don't know how to express sadness or jealousy except in anger. You see pockets where a group of lads is causing havoc, but people are afraid to speak out. It's a fear of the parents' backlash or even of the older brothers and sisters. In those cases, Asbos will mean nothing".
It could work for certain children, she concedes, "who were brought up to respect authority but who get involved with the wrong group and do something just because they have an audience . . . But where I come from, there aren't many of them. What you do have far more of are those who know the system, who know they're entitled to three cautions under the juvenile justice system, for example. It's very frustrating for us. Not only do they understand the system, because the older ones are teaching them, but they are also being used by the older ones to commit offences - such as breaking and entering or carrying drugs - because they're juveniles".
The Asbos response "is fully consistent with the Government wanting to be seen to be doing something. Window dressing. It will not address the causes of anti-social behaviour", says Dr Kilkelly of UCC. "Generally, these children are already in the system in some form. What's wrong with the powers the gardaí already have? Why not fully resource all the . . . mechanisms that are there in the Children Act - provisions such as family conferences and where the HSE is given responsibility for children with unmet needs who come before the Children's Court?
"That's the bridge between the youth justice system and the welfare system, because in most cases there are underlying issues. Normal, healthy children do not behave in such destructive ways. The Act says all the right things and offers very good solutions but it has not been fully supported by resources or by the politicians. If society's only response is to place a child under a court order and put them in detention when they breach that order, we are seriously short in our imagination."
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, politicised by his job as a teacher in Dublin's Sherriff Street and now deputy Lord Mayor, is equally certain that Asbos will change nothing. But his message - spelling out the link between disadvantage, disempowerment and anti-social behaviour - is one that few people wanted to hear this week. "An Asbo is a symptom of a society that is ill-at-ease with itself. Slap an Asbo on a child? Is that going to stop him? We have a crisis in disadvantaged education. We did a survey of eight schools in the northeast inner city, eight schools that are under threat of losing their special needs resources, and it found 50 per cent of the children had basic reading problems."
Many of these childrens' parents themselves are early school-leavers and have low literacy levels. If children don't have the basic ability to read, they are disempowered; they become the marginalised, the disenfranchised, and are forgotten about, like their parents. But they'll find empowerment in other ways - through drugs, criminality and anti-social behaviour. Poverty is raising its head and kicking back. Before the age of 10, many are lost.
"They're falling through the system, left, right and centre, because of the lack of resources and respect for working-class people."
These disadvantaged inner-city schools, Ó'Ríordáin points out, have had to fall back on funding from the Society of St Vincent de Paul and the Dublin Docklands Development Board for such basic essentials as psychological assessments.
Privately, gardaí say they already have "legislation coming out of our ears", as one of them put it, "but little or no follow-through". He talks about the many enlightened but under-resourced, totally unresourced or unimplemented provisions of the Children Act.
Time and again, observers return to the issue of parental responsibility and of involving them in family conferences, as provided for in the Children Act.
The director of the Munster youth offender programme reckons that in three out of five cases, the parents are helpless to control the child or lack the mental or educational resources. In two out of five cases, she estimates, the parents are neglecting their responsibility, "particularly around, say, a child of 14 wandering around at night, and with a slight knowledge of where they are but not actually confirming it".
"You're trying to teach responsibility and accountability," says the Munster project director. "Then you find the whole issue of delay in the system. A young person does something and then, more often than not, it's left on the long finger. That child is not learning to be accountable. You could ask a child what he's going to court for and very often he doesn't know. One of the things we have to get away from is slapping an order on a child just to shut them up."
Ó Ríordáin, who says he knows "exactly what intimidation is about", since he has been a target himself following his outspoken comments about drug pushers around the school, believes that the "most important section of the Garda is the community policing elements - not the drug squad, or the CAB or all the others that get the publicity. The kids instinctively know when a guard gives a s**t. You can't fake it. But the problem is that the community garda section is completely under-resourced. It's not even taken seriously within the Garda; it's something you do for a while before you get promotion. There are very good gardaí out there, but what happens is that you get a good one and he's gone in a couple of years. Disadvantaged communities are very quick to believe the worst of the guards and unfortunately it's often justified."
BUT WHAT ABOUT the victims of the taunts and harassments of the badly behaved youth? "They deserve something that will work," says Dr Kilkelly.
"Their tormentor can be back out in three months and that person will still be in fear. The Children Act says that you should sit down, figure out what the problem is, so that the perpetrator understands what is happening and that the other person is a human too. It comes back to community policing.
"Juvenile liaison officers do excellent work but they are not being properly resourced. Instead, we have behaviour orders. I don't think they have any resourcing and there appears not to be a scrap of policy as to how they are to be applied."
Meanwhile, young people who have managed to keep their heads up in the past week might, if they looked very hard, have noticed some good news about themselves and their social and family life.
In spite of the fact that only a quarter of 12- to 17-year-olds surveyed felt happy about the way they were at the time, or that, in a survey of 3,830 teenagers, 28 per cent of them suffered from some degree of depression or emotional disorder, that a quarter said they had been bullied recently or that less than a third of 15- to 17-year-olds felt they had good places to spend their time, they were a surprisingly happy and sociable bunch. Most of them had plenty of friends, talked easily to their parents and felt safe where they lived. Some 90 per cent of them said they were happy with life. For more than a third of them, startlingly, reading was their favourite hobby.
They have problems - but they are entitled to ask, how would their perfect elders have coped as youths, given similar circumstances to today?