Kathy Sheridan: They felt like masters of the universe. They weren’t even masters of themselves

On a lonely Inishowen road in July 2010, only the driver survived of eight young men packed into a single car. The oldest was 23. The eighth fatality was Hugh Friel, a kindly 66-year-old farmer driving home from bingo. At Friel’s funeral in Clonmany, Fr Fintan Diggin reflected on the huge cultural change since he first arrived in the traditional fishing community. Where many of the houses then had displayed mementoes of loved ones lost at sea, that had changed to the loss of life on land, “and we are left with despair, tragedy and suffering”.The other seven funerals sketched pictures of exuberant young lads, full of craic and wild for cars, who believed themselves invincible. Symbols of their lives laid at the altar included a car-racing magazine, a photograph of an old, souped-up BMW and a 2010 “driver of the year” trophy.After a decade of cataclysmic losses, underscored by huge public concern about end-of-life bangers being routinely sold to underage boys, it felt like an inflection point. The past weekend – which saw the extinction of five teenage lives in a BMW being driven the wrong way down a motorway causing serious injuries to three sisters and a little boy – may have been another.Common threads remain. In the 2000s gardaí were privately expressing deep frustration at a lack of co-operation from parents, who in turn accused gardaí of harassing their sons.READ MOREThere was a deep anger about the death of Hugh Friel and a long-simmering frustration about young lads roaring through housing estates and narrow roads – but also a reluctance to make a public complaint. It takes courage to report a neighbour’s child to the Garda and to follow it up in public.But that simple youthful passion for cars and reckless speed was far easier to understand, especially where public transport was a rarity and rural children had grown up driving tractors and stripping car engines.By contrast, last weekend’s multiple tragedies have yielded incomprehension and rage. This era’s special contribution is social media, a place where visceral hatred is spewed out towards five dead children and their families and words like “subhuman” are thrown into the public sphere, a place where some of the boys’ own self-heroising social media posts found a fateful outlet.Their posts were little different in tone to millions of other attention addicts with their pitiable craving for status in the form of clicks, likes and viral posts. As the stakes ratcheted up, they showed a defiant middle finger to the law, to society’s rules, to their own heartbroken relatives and finally to death itself. In their balaclavas and getaway cars they had power and control. They felt like masters of the universe. They didn’t know that boys of their age are not even masters of themselves, but the opposite. That their brain development stage means they are at the peak of conformity to peer influence, often driven by anxiety and insecurity; that their impulse control and long-term reasoning lag far behind that childish craving for social approval; that they are wired almost for self-obliterating dares and challenges. Which makes them ideal fodder for shadowy adults and the tech bros’ meat machines.Grown-ups had a role in every part of this, and not just the teenagers’ family or failed role models or depraved tech greed or deficient justice systems. Someone, wittingly or otherwise, bought the car that ended up in the possession of a bunch of dangerous children. Many, many responsible adults knew what some or all of those boys were doing and failed to act.They facilitated the activities of the so-called Lucky Dip gang to which some of the dead boys were reportedly connected, the loose network of teenagers stealing modest cars because they are easiest to access but which are essential to ordinary rural lives. They weren’t stealing them for money but to roar through towns and villages, robbing and traumatising people running small shops and businesses.The danger of silly nicknames is that they make the perpetrators sound harmless and funny. A suspected “Lucky Dip” robbery of our village shop, a family-run business, saw one of the perpetrators violently smash a hammer into the freezer on his way out, simply to terrorise the woman behind the counter.[ TikTok ‘monitoring’ M9 crash content and defends record on removing harmful postsOpens in new window ]And yet according to internal Garda figures seen by RTÉ’s Prime Time, which showed that 11 particularly active members of the gang have been charged a combined 427 times, the average age of those identified in that sweep was just 16. No parables of good versus evil or yelps of outrage are going to change those broken lives. What these and recent similar events demonstrate is that the juvenile justice system and law enforcement are a perpetual mystery that need to be explained to the public, urgently. That the social media giants steam on, publishing crimes and hate speech.And that grown-ups in every sphere have a lot of work to do. The media could begin by staying away from the funerals.