Over the past 10 days, 12 people have lost their lives in the United Kingdom and Ireland from the same proximate cause: the decision of young people to drive at speed down a road in the wrong direction.
In Ireland, on 16 August, five teenagers who were part of a wider gang of young car thieves known for attempting to engage police in car chases died when the stolen vehicle they were driving on the wrong side of Ireland’s M9 motorway collided with a family car containing three women in their twenties and a child. The five teenagers were essentially vaporized, such was the force of the impact. Their unwitting victims in the other car are fighting for lives that, in the best-case scenario, will never be the same again.
Days later, near Middlesbrough in north-east England, five more young men – ranging in age from 17 to 23 – were killed when their own stolen car collided head-on with a police vehicle that was attempting to engage them. In that case, the occupants of the other car also died, bringing the death total to 12.
Two Countries, One Culture
That these incidents should happen in the same week, in two separate jurisdictions that share much of the same culture, is both an awful coincidence and simultaneously not much of a surprise. They are the culmination of a trend increasingly being adopted by a cohort of disaffected and alienated young men seeking some combination of thrills, masculine affirmation and the social status conferred by the bleakest part of the internet upon those who performatively break the law.
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Irish social scientists have even come up with a whole classification to describe the phenomenon: “performative crimes”. That is, crimes that are committed not for financial gain or out of desperation, but as a way for some young men to prove themselves alpha males in the cultures that they inhabit.
Culture is a relevant consideration. In the Irish case, three of the dead were members of the Irish Traveller community, a group well known for jealously guarding its own culture despite how backward and medieval it often appears to outsiders: cousin marriage, illiteracy, enormously high incarceration rates and internecine feuding that often erupts into violence. The backgrounds of the dead British offenders are not yet known.
A State Unequipped
Regardless of culture, what is abundantly clear is that the state in both cases is entirely unable – or has been to date – to confront this new kind of reckless crime. Police often operate with a hand tied figuratively behind their backs. Irish police, for example, are formally banned from intervening if a car is driven the wrong way down a motorway, lest their intervention provoke a more serious accident.
Further, since these crimes are committed by juveniles, it is often the case that police intervention has little effect: a majority of the dead in the Irish case had long criminal records, and the suspected driver of the car was out on bail for another offense. The courts in the UK and Ireland are reluctant to incarcerate teenagers, except in extremis. This means that for many young men, the law is toothless against them, which appears to add to both the thrill and the status they acquire from so publicly flouting it.
The problem of disaffected young men is not a new one. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare has the Shepherd say: “I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.” In that sense, perhaps, the young car thieves of the British Isles are simply honoring the ancient tradition of feckless, reckless and dangerous male youth.
Politicians Respond: A New Law, Same as the Old Law
Yet it is simultaneously true that, in both jurisdictions, the criminal justice system is singularly failing to protect the rest of society from the threat. Pathetically, the Irish justice minister responded to last week’s horror by solemnly announcing that the government would create a new offense of driving the wrong way on a motorway – an offense already covered by dangerous-driving laws, not to mention the existing laws against speeding, evading the police or stealing cars.
Response Two: Blame Someone Else
The media and government in both countries, meanwhile, sought to deflect the blame away from society and onto social-media companies. The young men engaged in this behavior, they said, were influenced by the social status that platforms like TikTok reward them with for livestreaming their crime sprees. By late last week, politicians were huffing and puffing in Ireland not about the dangers of young criminals, but about the supposed fecklessness of social-media companies for not attending political hearings to answer for their role in the crime wave.
The bottom line, though, is this: governments exist in large part to protect public safety. Prisons and juvenile-detention facilities exist primarily to protect the public, by taking dangerous people out of circulation within society.
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Political Aversion to Deterrence
In both jurisdictions, there are simply not enough prisons, and there also exists a politically led aversion to ever jailing criminals, with incarceration replaced by endless second chances and the belief that delinquency can be cured by an understanding social worker.
In at least the Irish case, the dead young men would be alive today had they actually been punished for their previous crimes with long stretches behind bars, for both their own protection and that of the public. It is likely, one imagines, to emerge that the same thing is true in Britain.
Shakespeare understood, as most sensible people do, that feckless young men will always pose a threat to the societies that they live in unless they are strongly controlled by parental and state authority. As of now, nobody is being deterred from this behavior or punished for it other than with their own deaths when it goes wrong. That is a basic function of government. And increasingly, in the West, it is not being carried out.
