Grace Lynch was crossing Ratoath Road in Finglas on the way to meet her boyfriend on Sunday afternoon when she was hit by a scrambler motorbike. The 16-year-old died of the”catastrophic injuries” inflicted on her by the collision.
Her heartbroken mother, Siobhán, today shared a photograph of her beautiful daughter, who until yesterday afternoon had her whole life ahead of her.
“We are devastated. I want justice,” Siobhán Lynch said. “She was 16. She was a beautiful girl – funny, a great daughter, a sister, a granddaughter, a niece a cousin, a friend. My baby girl.”
“Myself and her father Martin, sisters Shauna and Brooke, and baby brother Jude will never forget that beautiful smile and the way she had of just being Grace,” she said. “Watching my baby take her last breath was the most heartbreaking thing any parent should watch. We want justice for our Grace.
“She didn’t need to die. She was crossing the road. I’m not going to let by baby die in vain. I need some sort of help to get these bikes off the road,” she added.
We don’t know the full facts around Grace’s horrific death yet, and the man who was arrested may be innocent of any charges. Scrambler bikes, however, and the illegal use of same, have been causing huge problems for communities for years.
Too many public spaces are tormented by young thugs tearing around estates on scramblers: and they need to be taken off the pavements and the parks and the football pitches and everywhere where they are used not just to annoy but to endanger and frighten people who have to live with the inevitable outcome of years of lax policing and crummy behavior and absolute indifference to safety of others.
Allowing thuggish behaviour to take hold and effectively terrorise whole communities can have horrific outcomes. And our dangerous coddling of criminal behaviour will inevitably lead to more deaths unless a serious course correction is undertaken.
Again, this is not a comment on the collision last Sunday as the full facts have to be revealed, but in general too many of the young teenagers tearing around on scrambler bikes are indifferent to the danger they pose to the lives of others. A substantial portion actually seem to get a kick out of this: out of the fear and upset they cause roaring around the estate, mounting the pavements, pulling wheelies up the middle of the road through the traffic. It’s all great craic and if you say anything you’re coming down hard on young people who are bored because of lack of facilities, or who are disadvantaged, etc.
A pity about them. How much more of this coddling are we meant to engage in while clamping our eyes shut to the damage caused by careless, thuggish, bullying behaviour – and by raising a whole generation who are increasingly not required to take responsibility for the own actions?
Why do so many parents buy these expensive motorbikes for their spoiled teenage boys who have neither the maturity, the sense, or the decency not to use them as a ever-accelerating source of anti-social behaviour? Dáil debates on the issue have heard from TDs who say that similar bikes are being bought for children. How has the social capital which is so vital to communities everywhere diminished to the point that acceding to the demands of teenage gurriers is more important than being a responsible parent? Fractured families and absent fathers have a big impact on the rise of lawless teenage boys too, but we’re not allowed to talk about that either.
It’s well-known that disruptive behaviour with scramblers is maximal on Christmas Day because so many teens are illegally gifted with these potentially lethal bikes when they have neither the skill nor the desire to use them safely.
In fact, in addition to the hundreds of people injured by scrambler and quad bikes in the past decade, the two young men who were killed by the same three years apart – in 2013 and 2016 – both died on Christmas Day.
Leroy Coyle died in his mother’s arms after he lost control of a friend’s bike, pulling wheelies without a helmet. His mother hadn’t bought him a bike, and no doubt some teens and young men use scramblers responsibly, but a culture of doing what you like and to hell with the consequences has distorted how we deal with this and many other issues.
It’s illegal for scramblers to be used in estates and parks and green spaces, and they are in fact off-road bikes, but this is almost never enforced. Instead we get local representatives bleating about a lack of resources for young people and the need to build special parks so they can tear around to their heart’s content.
The “bored and disadvantaged” excuse doesn’t wash with me, nor with the people in Finglas I’ve talked to who are plagued by this crummy behaviour. There are far more activities available – including GAA clubs, soccer clubs, boxing, gymnastics, music and more – for kids to get involved than when I was a teenager. Disrupting and endangering your neighborhood by tearing around on huge motorbikes illegally should have been stamped down on from the beginning.
It’s pointless blaming the Gardaí really – last October it was reported that a “Garda unit trained to use drones to track scrambler motorcyclists that are “terrorising communities” cannot operate because of a lack of legislative clarity”. The government is faffing about with legislative clarity while gangs on scramblers are a scourge acting with impunity.
We’ve been conditioned not to address this lawlessness, to blame everything except the offenders themselves. We hear the same sort of rubbish from people who want to make drugs legal despite the evidence in the courts that innocent people often bear the brunt of cannabis-induced psychosis or a druggie’s need for a fix.
That dumb, dangerous attitude is everywhere, and it’s more often promoted by the kind of virtue-signalling liberals who live very far from Finglas but who continue to justify the kind of looseness in dealing with crime that is more focused on demands to build fewer prisons than on protecting ordinary people. The lawlessness that is engendered by this supposedly enlightened attitude to criminal behaviour can only spiral further out of control. Yet any mention of the need to apply the full rigors of the law is met with self-righteous accusations of being ‘tough on crime’ – and by association a harsh right-winger. Tell that to the families whose lives are being made a misery in mostly working-class communities.
There’s a price to pay for the failure to clamp down on criminal behaviour, and all-too-often it is paid by those already have had to endure the everyday manifestation of that lawlessness. We need to take a long, hard look at the inevitable outcomes of the coddling of criminal behaviour.